NISO Plus 2021

NISO Discourse Discussion for this session
https://discourse.niso.org/t/solving-problems-with-standards/85

NISO Recommended Practices for Video and Audio Metadata
Although many metadata standards address video and audio assets to some extent, a clear, commonly understood, and widely used set of properties is lacking. This is particularly problematic when assets are interchanged between their producers, such as educators, researchers, and documentarians, and their recipients, such as aggregators, libraries, and archives.

The NISO Video and Audio Metadata Working Group (VAMD) was formed to address this problem. Composed of technologists, librarians, aggregators, and publishers, the working group collaborated to develop a set of metadata properties deemed generally useful for the interchange of media assets. This includes bibliographic properties used for identification and citation, semantic properties useful for search and discovery, technical properties specific to media assets, and administrative properties to facilitate transactions.

This model is not intended to employ or replace existing metadata standards and vocabularies. Instead, the VAMD terms are a set of recommended properties to be expressed in the appropriate metadata scheme for specific parties, serving as a hub to facilitate interchange between parties that use different metadata schemes.

This session will present the current state of media asset interchange, the use cases addressed, and the results of a comparison with nine existing related standards, such as MARC and PBCore.

Introducing the Software Citation: Giving Credit Where Credit is Due
Research is commonly intense and complicated. The work to analyze a hypothesis involves building on the discovery of others and contributing new ideas and approaches. Sometimes researchers use tools designed for their community that are licensed or open source, and sometimes they must develop their own software or workflow in order to achieve their objectives. This software (aka code, model) is an important research object that supports transparency and reproducibility of our research. Without the software, it can be much harder or impossible to fully understand how the resulting data were generated and to have faith in the conclusions presented in the paper.

In this session we will share (via slides) 1) the guidance developed by the FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group for authors, developers, and journals; 2) how it supports and aligns to efforts happening around JATS/JATS4R; and 3) ways for the community to evaluate how well software citations, and necessary availability statements are being provided by authors.


Subsetting the JATS DTD – So What?
As scholarly publishers transition from manual, PDF-based workflows to automated, XML-based workflows, they will find important advantages in subsetting the JATS (Journal Article Tag Suite) DTD.

JATS was designed as a descriptive, not a prescriptive, DTD, so it allows for different ways to capture the same content and information. While this was necessary to accommodate widely divergent journal styles and legacy content, the looseness of the DTD poses problems for people building tools to bring XML forward in more automated publishing workflows. For example, building an online XML editor that allows all 11 ways of associating authors and affiliations would be unnecessarily complex and expensive to develop and maintain.

Fortunately, the JATS DTD was also designed to be easily subsetted. Content analysts can narrow the variations that developers are required to build to, making automated systems cheaper to develop and more robust. A well-designed subset that considers industry initiatives such as JATS4R also aids in making XML content more machine-readable and thus more discoverable.