Descriptorsby

Descriptorsby is a metadata field used in information systems to indicate the source or agent responsible for assigning descriptors to a resource. A descriptor is a tag or label that communicates a characteristic such as topic, genre, color, or function. The descriptorsby property records who or what contributed those descriptors, such as a human curator, a user, an automated classifier, or an external taxonomy.

Purpose and interpretation: By capturing the source of descriptors, descriptorsby supports provenance, accountability, and reproducibility. It can enable filtering or reweighting descriptors by source, resolve conflicts when sources disagree, and help with audit trails. Systems may allow multiple sources for a single set of descriptors, or track a primary source with secondary contributors. Timestamps and confidence scores are often associated with descriptors or with the descriptorsby field.

Implementation: In data schemas, descriptorsby is typically a separate field that accompanies a descriptors array or map. In JSON-based schemas, it may be modeled as a string or list of agents, such as user IDs, classifier names, or organization identifiers. In graph-based schemas, descriptorsby could be represented as a relation from a resource to an agent through a provenance predicate.

Applications: Descriptorsby is used in digital libraries, content management, image and video tagging, and knowledge graphs to improve traceability, governance, and quality control. It complements controlled vocabularies by documenting source and method of descriptor assignment.

See also: provenance, metadata, attribution, descriptor, ontology.