Galelinked

Galelinked is an open standard for semantically linking digital artifacts across repositories to support unified search, provenance tracking, and durable references. It defines a lightweight graph model and a minimal vocabulary that can be mapped to existing metadata schemas.

Origin and scope: The term and the initial specification emerged from a collaborative community project in the early 2020s focused on digital curation and scholarly data interoperability.

Model and data structures: Galelinked uses a graph where nodes represent entities (people, datasets, artifacts), events (creation, modification), and agents (institutions, individuals), and edges represent relationships such as createdBy, derivesFrom, isRelatedTo, and archivedAt. Each node is identified by a URI, and provenance is captured with timestamps and source metadata. The core spec provides a compact schema that can be extended by domain-specific vocabularies.

Interoperability: The standard emphasizes mappings to existing schemas like Dublin Core and schema.org. It is designed to be domain-agnostic, with adapters to ingest from various formats (CSV, JSON-LD, XML) and export to RDF with supporting queries.

Usage and reception: Galelinked has been adopted by several university archives and open data platforms experimenting with cross-collection search and reproducible research workflows. Critics note the added complexity of governance and the need for robust alignment between participating repositories.