The need for addressing multilingualism, ambiguity and interoperability for visual resources management across metadata platforms | First Monday

Abstract:  The digitization of visual resources and the creation of corresponding metadata that meets the criteria of clarity and interoperability, while also approaching the needs of the multilingual Web, are pressing concerns. Because visual resources make up a significant percentage of digital information, this paper focuses on the aforementioned concerns and proposes ways to address them, including swift progression and adoption of cohesive, multi-user, multilingual metadata standardization to improve digital access and to allow all descriptive image metadata to be approachable and translatable. We offer some recommendations such as those involved in visual resource management moving away from using primarily the English writing system based metadata schemas in order to provide flexible lexicon in non-Roman languages, which can easily be recognized and interpreted by both monolingual and multilingual users alike as well as facilitate digital metadata interoperability.