Discuss metadata needs

[jmatsushita]

@elationfoundation

Following on our discussion and your great research work in this draft, I thought I'd take down some notes to continue the conversation in the open. By the way DocOps is a really cool moniker for this approach too :)

If we abstract away from particular implementation then one of the most important needs to allow some form of interoperability is to agree on metadata (or at least map metadata format to one another). There are possibly some data format considerations (for instance with #12) for interop at the implementation level but let's set them aside for now.

If we look at it from a use case perspective (looking through the metadata available here https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elationfoundation/using-tor-browser-bundle/master/metadata.md) then

• in terms of basic publishing, there's convergence generally on DC as a minimal set of metadata for any document (basically creator and title). It's a low hanging fruit if our Jekyll boilerplate (Design DX for contentascode adoption #15) generates DC in JSON-LD.
• in a software documentation context, there is an added need to refer to the software in question in a unique way. This is not a trivial matter as mentioned here and here. There's also aspect related to the availability of software or content for specific platforms. There's also an interesting use case of displaying citation of code from github described here: https://guides.github.com/activities/citable-code/
• in an online education context, there's a need for specifying which types of educational material a particular piece of content refers to (background information, quizz, reference material, activity,...). Domain specific ontologies regarding education will help (for instance grounding this in the ADIDS model or other models).

I can think of other needs that could be included as metadata such as:

• Intended Audiences, in terms of
  • Geography (including language or communities - possibly virtual)
  • Profession
  • Other aspects useful in an educational context (learning style, proficiency in related matter,...) particularly if adaptive learning is a part of it.
• Intention, i.e. if the user comes with a particular intention then is the content relevant?

With other domain specific concerns (for instance with digital security education) other aspects will come up such as risk profiles or threats.