Organizing Apples: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Pomological Descriptive Metadata

The apple (Malus domestica Borkh.) has maintained a position of significant historical and cultural importance across several eras in the United States. Because apples only maintain their genetics through human cultivation, their fruit is generally categorized and organized as cultivars which have differentiated themselves from the rest of the species over generations of selective breeding. Experts and amateurs alike have written and systematized descriptions of apple cultivars for various purposes but attempts to standardize organization of the resulting metadata have been infrequent and lack utility across multiple contexts. This paper will assess the descriptive schemas of six pomological description resources ranging from the late 19th century to the present day through qualitative content analysis and metadata crosswalking. The resulting attribute set will then be compared with an existing descriptive schema for plant breeders, the UPOV Convention, with an eye towards exploring the viability of a more universal system for organizing descriptive metadata for physical descriptions of apples.