A mechanism is needed to ensure that metadata belonging to the core set can be identified unambiguously and that proprietary metadata can be added to the various AKOMA NTOSO document models without name clashes.

Metadata names are constructed using a prefix pointing to the country codes of the relevant emanating body (such as the Parliament). It is assumed that name clashes in metadata items within a single country are resolved before being committed to actual AKOMA NTOSO documents.

AKOMA NTOSO assumes the following conventions regarding metadata items:

• Items without prefixes belong to the core set of metadata elements and are available to all emanating bodies in their explicitly stated meaning.
• Items with a given country prefix are local to a specific country and are not to be used outside of documents coming from that country.Applications receiving documents that contain metadata elements with unknown prefix CAN take no further actions on them, but MUST preserve them when delivering the documents to other applications down the line. 
  
• Items within the AKOMA-NTOSO namespace are to be considered as local but are scoped to the whole AKOMA NTOSO framework, rather that to an individual country. A central repository and registry of metadata names belonging to the AKOMA-NTOSO prefix will be kept to which any individual emanating body can contribute. The registry will make sure that no name clashes exist in AKOMA NTOSO scoped local extensions.

The Eurovoc thesaurus (or, better yet, an African-scoped version of Eurovoc) is explicitly supported as the provider of values for a number of metadata items, most notably the subject descriptor (metadata name: keyword).

<meta>
    ...
    <keywords dictionary=”Eurovoc”>
        <keyword value=”Community programme”/>
        <keyword value=”Internet”/>
        <keyword value=”information technology”/>
        <keyword value=”new technology”/>
        <keyword value=”data protection”/>
    </keywords>
    ...
</meta>

The value “Afrivoc”, as value for the vocabulary attribute, is reserved for possible use with a pan-African variant on Eurovoc-Africa, the details of which are still under discussion. It may not be necessary to use this extra name if the African customisations of Eurovoc-Africa can be achieved within the existing Eurovoc-Africa extension mechanisms.