Compilation of Recommendations

Details

Short Title

R 5: Implement markup syntax consistently by following community 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

Interlinking/ interoperability

Addressed Stakeholders

data service providers

Keywords

metadata

Text

aving decided on the scope and the set of properties to be included in the structured data, the next step is to syntactically mark up and serialise the structured data. As discussed in Section 3, Schema.org and its three serialisations, RDFa, microdata and JSON-LD38, make it easy to embed structured metadata into a resource’s web page. These serialisations are to declare the type and the properties of a resource (as shown in Figure 4), as each property is expressed as a pair of “property name”:“property value”. This recommendation takes JSON-LD as an example, as JSON-LD is designed as a lightweight way to express RDFa and microdata; its adoption is also favoured by major search engines. It is recommended to refer to the implementation guidelines (Jones, et al. 2021) from the ESIP Schema.org cluster41 for detailed implementation guidelines for each required and recommended data property, for ‘dataset’ and ‘dataCatalogue’. For a complete JSON-LD Syntax, one can refer to W3C recommendation “JSON-LD 1.1 A JSON-based Serialisation for linked data” (W3C, 2021a), and W3C JSON-LD Best Practices for examples (W3C, 2021b). We provide a brief overview below with examples to illustrate ‘suboptimal’ and good practice’ examples when possible. Unlike the ‘suboptimal’ examples, the good practice examples clearly specify the type of resource object, resource property and property value; since the structured data is primarily for machines to process, machines require proper context to interpret presented data.