Blalike

Blalike is a fictional open-standard ecosystem designed for describing, exchanging, and validating metadata for digital assets. It provides a modular, JSON-based core schema, optional extensions, and reference implementations intended to run across different platforms. Core goals include interoperability, provenance tracking, and flexible integration with existing library catalogs and content management systems.

History of Blalike traces its conceptual origins to a 2012 collaboration among libraries and digital-archiving groups. Blalike Core 1.0 appeared in 2014 as a minimal metadata model, with major revisions in 2017 (Blalike 2.0) introducing extended vocabularies and a pluggable ontology mechanism. Blalike 3.0, released in 2021, added privacy-preserving access controls and enhanced API compatibility to support broader use.

Technical overview centers on a core schema that defines standard properties such as title, creator, date, format, rights, and identifier. The framework supports extensible ontologies through named namespaces, enabling domain-specific fields without breaking compatibility. Data can be represented in JSON-LD and addressed via content hashes, with provenance records time-stamped and linked to digital signatures. Reference implementations are available in JavaScript, Python, and Java, and APIs cover ingestion, search, and batch updates.

Usage and reception within the imagined ecosystem depict Blalike as a useful framework for collaborative metadata work, aiming to reduce drift between repositories and improve cross-platform discovery. Critics raise concerns about complexity and the governance required to maintain stable vocabularies and consistent updates over time.

See also: metadata standards, digital asset management, open data, interoperability.