The technologies to access metadata and repository catalogues were developed alongside with the emergence of the internet. XML is fairly verbose and its mark-up adds a lot of bulk to the data payload, which is manageable with catalogues containing thousands to millions of entries, but becomes a significant burden once catalogues scale to billions of entries.
Indexing the Internet at large led to the development of lightweight encodings based on JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD). Leveraging web architecture patterns around structured data for the web gives access to the semantic web and ways to encode the context around data. This makes building a multi-domain network far easier. In addition, the use of web architecture allows third parties access use and provide offerings based on the open, well-known architecture.
This session will discuss how web architectures can be used to make metadata and repository catalogues available on a gigascale.