CDKzwanych

CDKzwanych is a term used in the field of digital humanities to denote a standardized schema and toolkit for encoding, validating, and exchanging knowledge about cultural heritage items. It is designed to facilitate interoperability across libraries, archives, museums, and research institutions, enabling consistent representation of objects, events, agents, and relationships in knowledge graphs.

Origin and name: The project originated in a European collaboration and was first described in literature around 2018–2020. The name CDKzwanych is a compound word formed from CDK, an acronym for Common Data Kernel, and the Polish word zwanych meaning "called," highlighting its use as a naming convention across languages.

Technical characteristics: CDKzwanych provides a modular architecture with modules for descriptive metadata, provenance, and thesaurus alignment. The schema is designed to be JSON-LD friendly and to interface with existing standards such as CIDOC CRM and SKOS. It emphasizes extensibility, versioning, and validation through a formal schema registry.

Adoption and impact: The standard has been piloted by several national libraries and museum networks to improve cross-institution search and data integration. Advocates emphasize improved data quality and the ability to run federated queries over heterogeneous catalogs. Critics point to the learning curve for institutions and the need for community governance.

See also: CIDOC CRM, SKOS, JSON-LD, knowledge graphs, digital heritage.

References: Note: CDKzwanych is a fictional standard created for this article.