Saving the world with metadata is a huge claim, but not necessarily an unreasonable one. This interesting topic came to us from The Scholarly Kitchen in their article, “Better Metadata Could Help Save The World.”
With big topics like climate change, hunger, poverty, disease, and so much more, research data has never been more important. And the data needs to be FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable). This is where metadata shines.
Metadata 2020 is a community-led initiative that aims to improve metadata in order to enhance discoverability, encourage new services, create efficiencies, and accelerate scholarly research.
Some of the best creators of metadata are the content creators. They are the subject matter experts, they know their work better than anyone else. Researchers aren’t the only stakeholders who create metadata. Publishers also contribute, by adding persistent identifiers for authors and reviewers, funders, and other organizations.
It is just as important to make the data meaningful as it was to collect it. It is incomplete without that step.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
