📘 MetaVox – Metadata for Nextcloud

MetaVox ("Vox” = voice. Metadata as 'the voice of the document’.) is an open-source Nextcloud app developed by the University of Amsterdam and the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.
Originally built for education, MetaVox is broadly applicable across government, non-profit, and other professional sectors.

It adds metadata to documents stored in Nextcloud, making them easier to organize, interpret, and retrieve.

🎯 Purpose

The goal of MetaVox is to enrich digital documents with contextual metadata — such as topic, author intent, relevance, or classification — in a way that is:

• Structured and machine-readable
• Non-intrusive (no changes to file content)
• Compatible with existing Nextcloud workflows
• Designed for flexible use across education, government, and other document-driven environments

👥 Target Users

MetaVox is suitable for:

• Universities and educational institutions
• Government organizations
• Knowledge workers in research, legal, and administrative fields
• IT admins and architects deploying metadata-enhanced cloud infrastructure

🌱 Why MetaVox?

While Nextcloud provides basic metadata capabilities (tags, comments, etc.), MetaVox introduces rich, structured semantic metadata to support use cases such as:

• Curriculum and course tagging
• Policy and compliance classification
• Research annotation
• Document lifecycle and role-specific categorization

MetaVox - Metadata Management Requirements

Scope

MetaVox is a Nextcloud app designed to manage metadata specifically for Team folders. The goal is to offer controlled, role-based metadata definition and editing, with a clear distinction between Team folder metadata and Document-specific metadata.

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Functional Requirements

1. Metadata Scope and Visibility

• Metadata can only be assigned to Team folders and documents within Team folders.
• Metadata must not be assignable to personal folders or files.
• For each document inside a Team folder, the following must be shown:
  • Team folder metadata (read-only).
    • Not stored with the document
  • Document-specific metadata (editable depending on permissions).

2. Team folder Metadata Management

• Only administrators can define or modify Team folder metadata.
• Metadata types for Team folders must be configurable per folder.
• Team folder metadata definitions are created independently of document metadata definitions.
• Admins can import Team folder metadata definitions via a predefined .json format.
• Admins can export Team folder metadata definitions into a predefined .json format.

3. Document Metadata within Team folders

• Metadata can be assigned to individual documents inside Team folders.
• Only users with edit permissions on the document may edit document-specific metadata.
• Users with read-only access may view but not modify metadata.
• Metadata editing rights should inherit the document’s permissions.
• Admins can import Document metadata definitions via a predefined .json format.
• Admins can export Document metadata definitions into a predefined .json format.

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Permissions & Roles

• Metadata definitions (Team folder and document level) can only be created/modified by users with the admin role.
• Regular users may only view or edit document metadata based on their access level to the document.

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User Interface Requirements

• Metadata associated with a Team folder must be clearly visible when browsing the folder.
• When viewing a document, the interface must distinguish between:
  • Metadata shown from the Team folder (read-only).
  • Metadata specific to the document (editable if user has permission).

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Technical Requirements

• JSON schema must be defined for importing metadata definitions
• App must ensure metadata integrity and prevent unauthorized changes.
• Integration with Nextcloud’s permission system is required.

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Non-Functional Requirements

• Compatibility with the latest stable version of Nextcloud.
• Localization-ready (multi-language support).
• Performance should not be significantly impacted by large metadata sets.

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Future Considerations

• Each metadata field may have an optional default value.
  • JSON import support for default values
• Versioning of metadata definitions.
• Audit logs for metadata changes.
• Metadata must be searchable via Nextcloud’s global search.
• Metadata must be filterable in search results (e.g., by metadata field values).

Visuals

Installation

Add the app via the Nextcloud app store under Office & text apps

Roadmap

Retention policies

Authors and acknowledgment

Initial version created by Sam Ditmeijer and Rik Dekker

🛡 License

This project is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPLv3).
You are free to use, modify, and distribute this software under the terms of the AGPL license.