The Problem of the Yellow Milkmaid

Interest in open metadata is growing among policy makers, the cultural heritage sector, the research community, and software and application developers. At the European level, the Digital Agenda for Europe 2020 identifies ‘opening up public data resources for re-use’ as a key action in support of the Digital Single Market. The European Commission is reviewing the Directive on Re-Use of Public Sector Information. The Commission’s The New Renaissance report, published in January 2011, emphatically endorsed open data. At the national level, for example in the UK, the higher education community has issued the Open Metadata Principles calling on metadata to be openly available for innovative re-use.