The prevalence of online networking and collaboration has introduced new challenges for web developers — how do we capture information about people their expertise, interests and needs? Well, there are several options, one can create web pages with embedded personal information, try to locate directories of experts, search for communities of practice and hope for the best or use metadata to describe people and their expertise.
We have used metadata quite effectively for a number of years now to manage collections of resources, push out resources to busy people who haven’t time to search, to share collections and provide access to such collections from multiple access points.
Our next challenge is to capture metadata about people and thus enable the networking and the connections required in our fast changing world.
We are currently working on an innovative project that focuses on social networking and building online communities. In our research for this project we have uncovered a range of schemas available that describe such entities. The list here is not comprehensive but it will give you an idea of what is available and what information one should consider.
- Dublin Core Agents Working Group - has identified a draft element set
- Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project
- Interparty project
- indecs
- Encoded Archival Context
- Functional Requirements for Authority Records – IFLA UBCIM Working Group (FRANAR)
- International Standard Party Identifier (ISPI)
- vCard
- eduPerson
- Metadata Authority Description Schema (MADS)
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