An open, cross-domain vocabulary building system. Presentation given at the Summer 2023 ESIP conference, July 20.

1. YAMZ.net (Yet Another Metadata Zoo, pronounced “yams”)
Metadictionary
A crowdsourced vocabulary builder
Add terms and get permalinks (PIDs)
Use and link controlled terms
Share and refine project terms
Cherry-pick terms for ontologies
Dialog, test, and vote to quickly achieve consensus

2. Every standard starts with a big bunch of
proposed terminology
Which term definitions to keep or toss? Traditional approach
● Busy experts in <your fast-moving field> meet on standards committees
● … often take years to reach consensus
● … usually without field testing
We can do better

3. YAMZ.net (Yet Another Metadata Zoo)
Not a standard, not an ontology
● YAMZ is a living dictionary of metadata terms
● Each term gets an ARK permalink (PID), a proposed nano-standard
○ some are upvoted and rise in search results, others are downvoted or ignored
● Reputation-based voting (like Stack Overflow) helps you choose
● All parts of metadata “speech”, all domains
SimonRobertson@flickr

5. Standard metadata doesn’t exist, except
as inspiration for local dialects
Theory
● Director: “We interoperate with Dublin Core, PREMIS, schema.org, ….”
Practice
● Cataloger/Archivist/Scientist: “Honestly? Those are well-meant, untested
starting points. Our actual work needs local profiles (or modifications).”
Result
● All dialects, all the time – per institution, per laboratory, per project
● Crap interoperation (see Metadata's Bitter Harvest, Library Journal, 2004)

6. The Metadata Universe
Jenn Riley,
IU

7. Domain dialects – similar but different
Example: Earth Science > Cryospheric (frozen water) Science
● 28 different definitions of “glacier”
● 8 different definitions of “puddle”
● 13 different definitions of “firn” (old snow)
● 10 different definitions of “frazil ice” (fine spicules of floating ice)
● 7 different definitions of “ogive” (bands of light and dark ice in a glacier)
● … and so on
Sound familiar? What about your domain?

8. Crowdsourced, but with voting
vernacular
canonical
deprecated
3 classes
of term
← all terms are born here
← these don’t evolve …
← and they never go away
Each term gets a unique persistent id (ARK). Example:
term: iba
definition: other (origin language: Tagalog)
identifier: https://n2t.net/ark:/99152/h1193

9. Some discipline-specific subsets in YAMZ
Global Cryosphere Watch (GCW)
Citizen Science (Sloan)
DesignSafe (UTA)
Persistence statements (CDL, UCLA, TACC)
Space Science – Heliophysics (AGU, NASA, JPL)