The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has announced the public release of the 'Resource Type' Controlled Vocabulary for Open Access Repositories, version 1.1. The vocabulary articulates the different types of content available in repositories (and other scholarly systems) in a standardised way. The vocabulary will enhance cross-repository interoperability and is currently available in 12 languages include, English, Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish.
Common vocabularies are an important aspect of interoperability by ensuring that everyone is using the same word to mean the same thing. Controlled vocabularies, if applied consistently, offer a common terminology for describing content, and greatly assist with the discovery, sharing and reuse of content. The COAR Resource Type Vocabulary uses the SKOS standard and supports a hierarchical model that relates narrower and broader concepts. The concepts are also mapped to terms and concepts of similar vocabularies and dictionaries.
To support the application of the vocabulary, COAR is offering instructional webcasts as well as instructions to help repository managers implement the vocabularies in their own local environments.
COAR will also produce several other multilingual controlled vocabularies including 'date types', 'version types', and 'access modes'. COAR is committed to maintaining and updating the vocabularies as needed in the future.
Intrinsic to the nature of vocabularies is that they will change over time as resources evolve.
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