Datakieleen

Datakieleen is a conceptual language and framework for describing data structures, semantics, and constraints in a way that is both human-readable and machine-processable. The name blends Estonian words for data and language, signaling its aim to express data meaning in a formal yet accessible form. As an intermediate representation, datakieleen can be mapped to common data formats such as JSON, XML, or RDF, and to metadata standards used in data catalogs and governance programs.

Design goals include clear, machine-interpretable semantics, support for multilingual annotations, and interoperability across domains. Its grammar typically covers schemas, data types, relationships, cardinality, and validation rules, while encouraging explicit semantic links through ontologies and vocabularies. This combination facilitates data integration, lineage, cataloging, and semantic search.

Usage scenarios often involve institutions that manage large, multilingual data collections or that require strong governance and discoverability. Datakieleen is seen as complementary to existing domain-specific schemas, providing a unifying layer that can be layered over current formats to improve interoperability and information retrieval.

Origin and status: the concept has appeared in academic and policy discussions since the 2010s and 2020s, particularly in Northern European contexts, as part of efforts to standardize data descriptions without forcing a single rigid syntax. There is no universally adopted specification for datakieleen; rather, it is described as an approach or family of practices rather than a single standard.

See also: data modeling, metadata standards, ontology languages, JSON Schema, RDF/OWL.