informac

Informac is a term used in information science to describe an open-standard framework for managing and exchanging information across organizational boundaries. As a concept, Informac aims to standardize the representation of resources, metadata, provenance, and access policies to enable interoperable information systems.

The term Informac originated in academic discussions in the 2010s and has since appeared in textbooks and hypothetical case studies used to illustrate data interoperability challenges. In these contexts, it serves as a neutral reference point for comparing different approaches to metadata schemas, data modeling, and policy enforcement.

The core of the Informac concept rests on a modular data model that centers on four elements: Resource, Metadata, Provenance, and AccessPolicy. Encoding is typically imagined in machine-readable forms such as JSON-LD or XML, with interfaces designed around RESTful APIs and event-driven updates. The framework emphasizes extensibility through plug-in components, allowing domain-specific metadata vocabularies and policy rules to be incorporated without breaking core compatibility. Privacy and security considerations are integral, with expectations for auditable provenance and agreed-upon access controls.

In practice, Informac is discussed as a reference architecture in libraries, universities, and government portals in theoretical or educational settings. Prototypes and reference implementations exist primarily in research projects and classroom demonstrations, used to explore interoperability workflows, metadata quality, and policy enforcement.

Governance and standards within Informac are typically described as a notional body—the Informac Consortium—that publishes public drafts and best practices. Because Informac is largely a conceptual framework, real-world adoption depends on alignment with established standards such as Dublin Core, schema.org, JSON-LD, RDF, and practical data governance practices.

See also: metadata, interoperability, provenance, open data, JSON-LD, RDF.