ISM's Specialized Vocabulary

These are the specialized terms that are required for ISM's metadata schema that cannot be found in other standard schemas.

Background

General Information about Terms (or Elements)

See this page to read about the rationale for reusing existing terms, and following sections about creating new terms.

"If suitable terms can be found in existing vocabularies, these should be reused to describe data wherever possible, rather than reinvented. Reuse of existing terms is highly desirable as it maximises the probability that data can be consumed by applications that may be tuned to well-known vocabularies, without requiring further pre-processing of the data or modification of the application."

DCMI 15 Elements

See this page for detailed definitions and usage suggestions for Dublin Core terms.

For the purpose of our project, the "dc:" prefix is used to make it very clear that these are DCMI terms, which is the standard procedure.

• dc:contributor
• dc:coverage
• dc:creator
• dc:date
• dc:description
• dc:format
• dc:identifier
• dc:language
• dc:publisher
• dc:relation
• dc:rights
• dc:source
• dc:subject
• dc:title
• dc:type

Omeka Predefined Terms

The Web app we plan to use to make our metadata widely available has guidelines for using the Dublin Core terms within the app.

See this page for the definitions of all the terms and their usage in Omeka.

Other Taxonomies

These lists contain terms that may be useful for ISM's purposes, so we do not have to reinvent them.

For more information see http://taxonomywarehouse.com and http://schema.org/ImageObject

NASA Thesaurus

This thesaurus contains the authorized subject terms by which the documents in the NASA STI Databases are indexed and retrieved.

Gale Aeronautics & Astronautics Thesaurus

design, construction, and operation of aircraft and spacecraft, and the technologies and processes that apply directly to the science of flight

Aerospace & High Technology Thesaurus

aeronautics, astronautics, and space sciences, as well as technology development and applications in complementary and supporting fields such as chemistry, geosciences, physics, communications, and electronics

Creative Commons Namespace

Used for CC license information

ISM's Proposed Terms

At least until our schema is registered with some standards organization, we will use the prefix "ism:[term]" for our vocabulary terms.

We decided to use all 15 DCMI terms, the Creative Commons terms, and added some 3D VW specific ones:

ism:grid

This would indicate which VW grid an object is used or optimized for, e.g. Second Life or Kitely

ism:objectType

Inventory type, i.e., clothing, gesture, animation, prim/prim set, sound, script, texture, etc. would be found in this element using a controlled vocabulary, while the dc:type element would be used to indicate things like "virtual" or "physical", or "mesh" or "sculpt" or "prim". Perhaps any dc:type object that is not described as physical should be assumed to be virtual? It may be necessary to define the vocabularies for each of these two elements to determine exactly which is which.

ism:objectFunction

This element would indicate how an object is used, e.g. "landscape" or "building" or "rocket" or "space probe" rather than what kind of object it is.

ism:permissions

For now, it would show SL or OS controlled permissions, i.e., Copy/Modify/Transfer/Export

Other terms or taxonomies may be added later.

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