dMeta: Sharing files and data sets togehter with their metadata if metadata cannot be embedded - digi-libris

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dMeta: Sharing files and data sets togehter with their metadata if metadata cannot be embedded

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dMeta stands for Data plus Metadata Zip-packagewhich are files with the ending *.dMeta or *.dpmz or even *.zip[1]. [Demo]
They are simply assemblies of electronic files of any kind tied firmly together with their corresponding metadata. Such a package may contain multiple pairs of data and metadata sets and even single metadata files containing virtual items or links to an external resource.

The concept aims at
  • connecting researchers with research in that anyfile can be coupled and transmitted together with its descriptive metadata. This can include research-relevant data from an instrument and support notes that are not normally included in a paper but that Open Access requires to be made available to the scientific universe. Scientists can more easily share resources and knowledge and it facilitates collaboration.
  • permitting libraries to distribute the descriptive metadata, which they hold anyhow in their own repositories, together with documents which they are not allowed to modify due to checksum verification of the original item.

  • increasing an authors' exposure by making sure that metadata survives peer review and page setup as the publisher can easily import this metadata in the final PDF prior to publishing.

In digi-libris you can add/edit metadata (citation relevant, search relevant, abstracts etc.) to any document in any format (downloaded material, your own work in progress, machine generated datasets, presentations and even virtual items such as printed papers, remote links or YouTube videos etc.) and then create an XMP-sidecar file containing all this metadata.
You can then bundle and distribute one or more items together with their corresponding XMP file into a dMeta zip file. These files are akin to EBPU files in that they are simply zip files with a known structure. There are normally two files with exactly the same name but with different extensions, one of which must be .XMP.
digi-libris will automatically associate the two as long as they are in the same directory or folder, even unzipped.
Stand-alone XMP files without associated electronic data file are treated as metadata of virtual items which is displayed in the same way as real objects. Double clicking on such an entry will activate the link to the underlying resource, if available.

Any software[2] that can interpret dMeta files will automatically associate the XMP metadata with the right file for automatic classification in the knowledge base and display of the metadata.

  1. Files with Ending .dMeta or .dpmz are automatically recognized and interpreted by digi-libris Reader and the contained content is directly added to your library folder, whereas files ending with .zip are slower because they have first to be analysed and you have to manually select a target directory.
  2. dMeta is a new and (so far unique) feature of digi-libris Reader but we hope that other software developers will adopt this format and help to make this eventually into a new and widely recognized standard for distributing digital content of any kind particularly in scholarly communication.
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