RDA/TDWG Attribution Metadata Working Group: Final Recommendations

RDA / TDWG Metadata Standards for attribution of physical and digital collections stewardship WG

Recommendation Title: RDA/TDWG Attribution Metadata Working Group: Final Recommendations

Impact: Supports standardized metadata for attributing work and tracking provenance in the curation and maintenance of research collections.

Recommendation package DOI: 10.15497/RDA00029

Group co-chairs and authors: Anne E Thessen, Matt Woodburn, Dimitris Koureas

Contributors: David Shorthouse, Deb Paul, Sarah Ramdeen, Denise Hills, Wim Hugo, Mike Conlon, Dave Dubin

Executive Summary

Research collections are an important tool for understanding the Earth, its systems, and human interaction. Despite the importance of collections, many are not maintained or curated as thoroughly as they should. Part of the reason for this is the lack of professional reward for curation, maintenance, or collection. To address this gap in attribution metadata, this Working Group recommends the use of PROV entities and properties to link people (Agent), the curatorial actions they perform (Activity), and the digital or physical objects they are curating (Entity). Assigning a Role to an Agent is optional. These recommendations are discussed in the context of the RDA and existing standards. A separate technical document gives specific examples of three use cases as RDF Turtle representations and diagrams.

The final recommendations were updated in February 2019, after comments received from the community. The previous version, which underwent the RDA community review, can be found here.