Discussion: Metadata

[adrybakov]

Topic: What technical metadata should be included in the file?

[adrybakov]

The metadata can be included in the "key - value" manner.

In my view the metadata would be of two types: physical (#10 or #2 for instance) and technical.

For the technical metadata I propose the following:

Key	Value	Mandatory
version	Version of the format specs, for example 1.0, etc.	yes
date	Date of the creation in the format dd.mm.yyyy	no
time	Time of the creation in the format "hh:mm" or "hh:mm UTCxXX"	no
author	Names, organisation, e-mails, etc. (arbitrary text field)	no
produced_by	name of the tool that produced the file	no
reference	reference to DOI if any publication is linked to the data	no
comment	Arbitrary text field	no

The version of the format is being mandatory as it will define how the format will be read (in the case there will be more than one version of the specification in the future). Even if all future specs will be backwards compatible, keeping the version number from the beginning is a good practice, in my opinion.

Which kind of physical metadata shall be included, together with their status (mandatory or not) should probably be decided in the corresponding issues and just referenced here.