The Divergence of Knowledge and Information Management Standards: A Pluralistic Approach

The article aimed to find out the divergence of knowledge and information management standards in a critical-analytical approach. Developing data entities management standards by the World Wide Web consortium and Web search tools, on the one hand, and designing the same kind of standards by cultural heritage community, on the other hand, cause divergence and the divergence will lead to pluralism that cannot solve current Web problems in data controlling and processing, especially, when we are encountering some challenges such as the big data phenomenon.

The linked data method and schema.org derived from W3C and Web search engines, and the knowledge and information management standards such as BIBFRAME, and the conceptual reference models such as IFLA LRM, developed by cultural heritage communities were compared with each other in terms of functionality. The reasons in cultural heritage context, causing divergence are analyzed with emphasizing on web capabilities and the features of web data entities.

It seems that the current pluralistic approach in developing the tools and methods through the W3C and search engines, for creating the semantic web will repeat previous unsuccessful experiences in web standards development. Accordingly, doing the vital processes such as authority control and the representation of relationship patterns for extracting knowledge and semantics from data contexts are necessary. On top of that, metadata interoperability, the imperfect understanding of web technologies, and describing special data entities, such as commercial products, comments of social networks, as well as, not developing the standards having complementary role to other standards such as content standards for metadata standards increase the pluralism.

Finally, improving the interaction and synergy of cultural heritage context’s standards specialists with the standards developers of web consortium and web search tools, as well as, adapting web standards to conceptual reference models in different contexts and other strategies to reach interoperability is recommended.