Marksib

Marksib is a fictional data-annotation and metadata-markup protocol described in theoretical discussions of information tagging. It is not an established standard, but is used here to illustrate how inline metadata might be attached to data streams or document payloads.

Overview: The marksib model treats data as a payload accompanied by a sequence of small annotation records, or marks, that attach to defined ranges or tokens within the payload. Marks carry minimal metadata and are designed to be lightweight and machine-parsable.

Format and components: Marks are encoded as type-length-value entries, enabling optional fields and future extensions. A marksib envelope typically includes a version, a namespace, and an integrity check, followed by one or more marks and then the payload. Each mark can indicate its scope (range or token) and may reference related resources.

Relationships and usage: The protocol supports relationships between marks and related resources through a sibling- or graph-like linkage, enabling provenance, versioning, and cross-document tagging. Practical scenarios include bibliographic tagging in digital libraries, markup of streaming data with timestamps and quality metrics, and archival annotation without altering the underlying data.

Origins and relation to other standards: Marksib is used in example-driven texts to contrast with existing standards such as MARC, METS, JSON-LD, or BibJSON. In practice, it highlights principles of inline tagging, namespace scoping, and extensibility that underlie metadata frameworks.