Metsad

Metsad is a fictional metadata standard designed to describe digital assets and their contexts in cultural heritage institutions, academic research, and digital libraries. The article presents Metsad as a hypothetical framework created for demonstration and educational purposes, rather than a real-world standard.

The stated goal of Metsad is to enable interoperable metadata exchange across disparate repositories. It envisions a modular schema with a core set of elements and optional extensions to accommodate specialized domains. The standard emphasizes provenance, rights information, and relationships between digital objects, and it supports multiple serializations, including XML, JSON, and RDF, to facilitate integration with existing data workflows and linked data ecosystems.

Core concepts in Metsad include entities such as Asset, Collection, Agent (person or organization), Event, and Rights. Relationships like isPartOf, originatedFrom, and hasMetadata are used to describe composition, lineage, and descriptive metadata. The model relies on controlled vocabularies and registries to promote consistency, while allowing extensions for institution-specific requirements.

Architecture and interoperability are central to Metsad’s design. The framework is intended to be extensible, with mappings to established standards to aid adoption. It positions itself as complementary to existing schemes rather than a replacement, offering pathways to align with Dublin Core, METS, PREMIS, and related vocabularies. Optional linkages to RDF graphs are encouraged to support semantic web applications and cross-repository queries.

History and imagined adoption: Metsad is attributed to a fictional consortium and a narrative of development in the early 2020s, with public drafts and versioning described for pedagogical context. In the hypothetical scenario, several libraries and archives explore small-scale pilots to assess interoperability and community governance.

See also: Dublin Core, METS, PREMIS, RDF.