informationfor

Informationfor is a term used in information management to denote a metadata property that specifies the intended use, audience, or purpose of a resource. It is not yet standardized across major schemas; rather, it is proposed as a transversal element that can exist alongside traditional fields such as title, creator, or subject. The idea is to capture user intent and context to improve discovery and access control.

The term can be represented as a controlled vocabulary or free text. In practice, an informationfor value might be "education; primary school students" or "researchers in cybersecurity." It can be used in cataloging workflows, search engines, and access management systems to tailor results or enforce restrictions.

In relation to other metadata, informationfor complements subject or genre by articulating why a user would seek the resource, rather than what the resource is about. It can be implemented in JSON-LD, Dublin Core, or schema.org as a general property, for example as informationFor: ["Education", "K-12"].

Adoption is uneven; some repositories adopt informationfor as a practical tagging aid, while others view it as redundant with existing fields like audience, audienceTarget, or audienceRole. Challenges include ambiguity, multilinguality, and maintaining consistency across collections.

Examples include a dataset labeled informationFor: ["clinical researchers"] or a policy document tagged informationFor: ["public policy practitioners", "journalists"].

See also: metadata; information retrieval; access control; schema.org; Dublin Core.