Metadata Standards

[curufea]

.. or the case for XML

FOAF
FOAF (friend-of-a-friend) as used by many social networks - I came at this at work through People Australia, where I wrote some transforms to convert data for use in authority records linked to name authorities.

What this meant for online use (see trove.nla.gov.au) is that you could look up a unique author or organisation (even if they had the same name as others, you could distinguish one from the other with Persistent Identifiers) and it would link to all their works, and anyone they were related to (and define the relationship)

What we used was the schema - EAC-CPF (Encoded Archival Context for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families )

How is it useful for Realm Works?
1) It's a standard (ergo in use and tested by Authorities, such as National Libraries)
2) It's XML and therefore text based
3) It can be transformed into other XML formats, such as the ever-popular amateur geneology format GED, which means - generated family trees and populated databases

I realise it's probably too late to implement, but could possibly be an export format for whatever non-standard legacy structure you've currently got ;-p

OAI
Open Archives Initiative
We use this to harvest databases - specifically the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) . It lets us start downloading records, restart if interrupted, resume at different times (scheduled) and work out which records we need and which are just duplicates.

How is it useful for Realm Works?
1) It's a standard (ergo in use and tested by Authorities, such as National Libraries)
2) It's XML and therefore text based
3) Transferring small to large amounts (e.g. millions) of records from/to storage (e.g. backing things up in clouds)
4) Resuming interrupts (network/internet weather, outages)