About YAMA
What is YAMA?
YAMA is a family of human-friendly formats and tools for creating, managing, and publishing metadata application profiles — formal descriptions of how a set of metadata records should be structured.
The family includes:
- YAMAML — the core YAML-native authoring language
- SimpleDSP — a compact tab-separated format (originally specified in Japanese as 簡易DSP)
- OWL-DSP — an OWL ontology for rich semantic description
History
YAMA is based on the original YAMA specification (Yet Another Metadata Application Profile, circa 2019). YAMAML extends and refines the original concepts with:
- A clearer document model
- Explicit data mapping capabilities
- Richer constraint vocabulary
- Interoperability with modern metadata standards (SHACL, ShEx, DCTAP, Frictionless)
License
The YAMA specifications are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
Acknowledgements
The SimpleDSP and OWL-DSP specifications are derived from the Metadata Information Sharing Guidelines, Chapter 6: Metadata Schema Definition Languages, produced circa 2011 under the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications’ Metadata Information Infrastructure Construction Project (メタデータ情報基盤構築事業), whose work was subsequently carried on by the Metadata Information Infrastructure Initiative (MI3) (メタデータ基盤協議会, Japan). The original Japanese specifications are preserved verbatim in the documentation.