ISP 5: ISCN content metadata specification

ISP: 5
Title: ISCN content metadata specification
Status: Final
Created: 2020-04-08
Edited: 2020-06-24

Motivation

ISCN content metadata records the metadata of the digital content itself. Since the diversity among different types of digital content, each type of digital content should define their schema. This proposal is going to define the basic metadata that common between various types of digital content. Any other specific content metadata should extend from this schema.

Proposal

ContentInfo

The ContentInfo contains the necessary metadata of digital content, including the fingerprint, the source location and the title & description of the digital content.

Property	Occurs	Expected Type	Description
context	1	URL	The context should be an URL to the schema definition, to be confirmed when this proposal is in the final stage.
type	1	String	The type of digital content. The specific type of digital content should define this value.
version	1	Number	Once the content metadata is registered, the version counts as 1. When there is any update later, the version number will go up one by one.
parent	0*~1	Linked Data	The link to the previous version of the content metadata. * Only if the version is 1, otherwise parent must be linked.
source	0~1	URL	An URL to locate the source of digital content.
edition	0~1	String	The edition of digital content. It can be any kind of string that the creator to choose.
fingerprint	1	String | Object	The fingerprint of digital content. The ISCN registry should define the precise algorithm used for each type of digital content. For example, it can be a particular cryptographic hash operation on the source file of the digital content or any newly defined data structure for the specific type of content. The chosen algorithm requires that it is a cryptographically strong hash function.
feature	0~1	String | Object	The feature is another fingerprint of content, which, unlike the cryptographic fingerprint, does not apply to the specific encoding of the file. Instead, it extracts the features of the content by some content-specific characteristics. For example, the feature field of an article could be an encoded vector of the keywords of that article.
title	1	String	A title or a name of the digital content, and it recommends to keep in short.
description	0~1	String	A brief description to introduce the digital content.
tags	0~1	Array of String	A list of hashtags/keywords of the digital content.