^{This page is part of © FOTW Flags Of The World website}

Vexillological Metadata Schema

See also:

For some weeks I have been working on the concept of a new vexillological paradigm for the Internet. The current model, while good, has the opportunity to grow beyond the mere presentation of information into the realm of electronic cataloguing of information by harvesting agents. This would be done using metadata. As recently as November 17, I had considered the possibility of using the basics of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative as the foundations, and then expanding with certain or selected elements that would be vexillologically orientated. Since then, however, I have considered the use of a Vexillological Metadata (VM) schema by itself.

Let me briefly summarize the issue. At present, we (and I include all vexillological organizations or persons who deliver flag information via the Internet) are in a basic mode - namely presenting information to the public at-large about flags. This is the state of cybervexillology at this time. But if we were to prepare metadata in such a way that it can be read by harvesting software used by libraries, universities, and the standard search engines, perhaps we can move beyond the simple presentation to where the information can be catalogued and used by scholars, students and interested individuals. Generic cybervexillology would become "electronic vexillology."

With every potential schema there have to be some definitions, and examples of use. For FOTW, we are probably a long way from implementing such a schema. But here are the basic elements:

author - the person who wrote the information. This is particularly useful on longer works or where the information is produced by one or two individuals. This element would be repetative, acknowledging the potential of a collaborative effort.
editor - the individual or potentially the organization which has edited the material for the specific website. This element would occur once in the schema.
abstract - a summary of the actual document. Mandatory element.
produced - the date the web page was produced. Limited to one occurance
keywords - generic keywords that could be used to describe the document. In this element the best solution would be the use of a controlled vocabulary which would eliminate the duplication of terms, not necessarily in the mold of the FOTW keyword recommendations. This element would be required.
artist - identification information as to the artist of the images on the page (with potential cross-references to the image name when multiple images and artists appear on a page). This element would be repetitive.
area - similar to the ISO 3166-1 codes, i.e. jp would be the tag for Japan. Subdivisions would be coded either in ISO 3166-2 format, or spelled out (i.e. us-md-Calvert County-Chesapeake Beach). This does not have to agree with the page name encoding done by the editor. This element would occur once.
language - using the ISO 639 coding format. Given the fact that there could be multiple languages on a page, the element could be static with allowances for multiple entries, such as the keyword entries. Mandatory.
family - a literal identifying the flag family or subfamily. This element is repeatable. We would need, as a vexillological community, to determine the classification scheme to be used, i.e. Crampton, Znamierowski, etc.
topology - this allows for a different encoding schema based on the appearance of the flag. Repeatable.
copyright - information regarding the copyright holder of the material under question. This element would be required and occur only once.
rights - information regarding the reproduction or use of the material and images on the page. This element would be optional, but could occur more than once, as I hope my examples will show.
blazon - The blazon of the flag, where appropriate, using official sources.
issn - The International Standard Serial Number for on-line publications, or for reprints from paper products. Example - Stars and Bars (Confederate States Vexillological Association) has an ISSN, as well as many vexillological publications (not all, however).
useage - An indication as to the useage, i.e. civil, etc. Perhaps we could use the standard CSW/CSW that is provided in lieu of a graphical representation.
adopted - Adoption date of the flag.
title - the page or document title. Mandatory element.

Unless identified as required, the element would be optional.

In preparation for my prospectus towards creating an e-vexillology web framework, I did some brief analysis of several websites which feature flags, discovering that of the small sample, none uses XHTML or XML at this time. Therefore, the first example relates to HTML only.

Let's take an actual article and pretend for a moment that it has been posted to