Documentation Dialects

All scientific disciplines and communities understand that documenting their data makes it trustworthy and helps others use it with confidence. Many communities develop conventions for their documentation that enable sharing within the community, but can make it more difficult to share outside the community. Sometimes these dialects are called "standards" but, in the end they are all dialects of the same documentation language.

This schematic shows two metadata dialects each of which has related recommendations (R1 - R6) and overlap for elements supporting the discovery use case. This is not unusual as discovery systems are very similar across domains while metadata that supports use, understanding, and trust can be more domain specific. Many dialects include the concept of core metadata for cross-domain content and extensions for community specific elements.