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The YAMZ metadictionary is being developed to host community-driven metadata terms and definitions. Chief goals include reducing duplicative metadata activity and unifying metadata practices across disciplines. Initial functional requirements are listed below.
- Low barrier for contributions.
- Transparency in the review process.
- Collective team review, with rotating responsibilities among community members (scientists, developers, organizations, curators, etc.)
- Consideration of elders (experts) to guide the review process and maintain thoughtful, balanced discussion.
- Voting capacity of all users on the candidacy of terms submitted and their use.
- Collective ownership of any user or organization.
- Stakeholder engagement in the design and review process.
Over the years, additional features have been added to YAMZ:
- Scoring of terms based on interactions.
- Import/Export of terms and standards from other sources.
- Comments can be added to each term.
- Term Tracking and Notification has been enabled, allowing for shortcuts from the main page to terms flagged by the user.
- Tagging and Searching has been implemented, allowing for advanced searching and sorting by the user.
- Terms added have been assigned a Unique Identifier, known as an Archival Resource Key (ARK).
Future enhancements will include:
- Creating relationships between terms
- Translations for usage of other languages
- Additional notification enhancements
- Creating lists of users
- Creating groups of users for ‘community’ submissions
YAMZ is in a state of cyclical development. Changes must be proposed and approved by the core team. YAMZ has achieved the state of minimum viable product. No future enhancements are currently out of scope, but any changes must be presented before the core team, and impacts should be clearly noted.
Due to funding primarily being granted from external groups and organizations, changes to YAMZ to accommodate considerations may need to be prioritized and introduced with little to no warning.
Change management should be noted as a current risk. There is no process in place to note changes per release. Change management processes should make changes to YAMZ functionality transparent to all users and interested parties for each version pushed to production.
Open issues are listed on the github: https://github.com/metadata-research/yamz/issues