R 9: Identify and join a community, and follow their established practices
- Short Title: R 9: Identify and join a community, and follow their established practices
- Source Documnent: Guidelines for publishing structured metadata on the Web V3.0
- Source Document Link: https://doi.org/10.15497/RDA00066
- Publishing Organisation: RDA Research Metadata Schemas WG
- Date of Publication: 2021-06-15
- Topic: Sustainability/ funding/ business-model
- Keywords: community, communication, exchange
- Addressed Stakeholders: data service providers, coordination fora
- Full Text: It has been emphasised in the previous recommendations that one should not reinvent the wheel. There may already exist communities that provide either a guideline or tools that facilitate steps in the metadata publishing process. Joining and contributing to a well-known and established community has the following advantages: It will enable a repository to leverage expertise from that community, thus saving resources and time which would otherwise be expended in exploring routes that may have already been explored; It will enable consistent implementation at the element, semantic and syntactic level of interoperability, and achieve maximum metadata harmonisation across repositories, aggregators and data discovery service providers; Almost all schemas are evolving; a sustainable community will review a schema and its applications (e.g., crosswalk, content generation) regularly in order to meet new requirements, and inform community members of changes. Any schema that requires revision will go through a community consultation process and have strong community support behind a change. Joining such a community will enable your specific use case to be considered; For example, after a community consultation, the bioschemas.org community proposed new types and properties to Schema.org to allow for description of life science resources. The community element is very important whenever exposing structured data as community agreements will guide some of your decisions. Here we include some examples together with at least one of their supported types and a page using it.