imDI

IMDI, short for Interoperability of Metadata for Digital Resources, is a metadata framework used to describe digital language resources in linguistics. It provides a structured schema intended to support discovery, access, and long-term preservation by enabling consistent descriptions across archives and projects. IMDI metadata describe who created or contributed to a resource, where and when data were collected, how the data were collected, and how the resource is structured and stored.

Development and use: IMDI emerged in the early 2000s within the language documentation and archival community, with involvement from major language archives and linguists. It is maintained by a community of practitioners and is commonly used in European and international language resource projects to facilitate resource discovery and interoperability between archives.

Structure and components: The IMDI model is modular and extensible. Core modules describe Resource (title, abstract, language, resource type), Corpus (files, encoding, size), Participants (roles such as speaker, consultant, researcher), Organizations, Places, and Events (dates, times, events). The metadata can be stored in XML and linked to related standards. Metadata records can be validated against the IMDI schema and exported or converted for use with other archival systems.

Tools and implementation: The IMDI Editor provides a user interface for creating and editing IMDI descriptions, while the IMDI Toolkit includes utilities for validation, conversion, and integration with archives. The framework is designed to interoperate with other metadata standards and archives to support data publishing and preservation.

Impact and status: IMDI remains widely used in language archives and research projects that document endangered languages, corpora, and audio collections. It supports data discovery, provenance tracking, and interoperability, contributing to long-term access to linguistic resources.