Ontologies and vocabularies

Considering the number of vocabularies in the appendix to be used by DataCite. I was wondering if there was any advice or consideration for creating or providing ontologies which could/should be used? This might also prevent the potential misalignment with other ontologies or explosion of quasi duplicate vocabularies being created.

For instance the relationType field has similar fields in the web arena, PROV or DublinCore but I wondered if there is an explicit version DataCite have or want to use?

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Thanks James - tagging @lizkrz here as I think she will be able to help :slight_smile:

Hi @jamayl, rather than looking to a single existing vocabulary/ontology, DataCite’s metadata working group typically reviews a range of applicable community standards and recommendations when creating controlled lists. For any given field, we often have requests for alignment with multiple different standards, which makes it difficult to choose just 1 vocabulary. We also consider interoperability with other DOI schemas, such as Crossref. As a result, the working group often chooses a list of values for a given field that may not perfectly align with a single vocabulary, but can be reasonably crosswalked to many standards. If you’re interested in contributing ideas for future schema updates, you can add new suggestions or comment on existing topics in the Metadata Schema section of our roadmap here DataCite - Roadmap

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Thanks @alicemeadows and @lizkrz
The reason we are asking is that we have the potential to maybe create our own vocabulary which could explicitly be aligned to DataCite appendices or loosely aligned with potential to use other sources but we would not want to just proliferate things with another vocabulary if one were to already exist. We appreciate also that DataCite do not want to proliferate this either.

I did not appreciate the google discussions for the working group and will have a browse there too.

Many thanks
James

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