Metadata Recommendations and Element Mappings

Purpose

To converge communities and publishers towards a shared set of recommended metadata concepts with related mappings between those recommended concepts and elements in important dialects.

Project plan

The following project plan is estimated to encompass work between May and October 2018.

• Identify list of metadata schemas that are in use (“Metadata Schema Index”)
• Share list of schemas with MD2020 community to see if there are any missing and to get feedback on which are most used
• Collaborate with Project 5 to discuss list of tags/elements in each of the schemas of interest and identify concepts that cut across them
• Map concepts and element names in a table
• Produce diagram/poster to highlight similarities and differences

Challenges

• Many communities and publishers develop recommendations for metadata in their disciplines or for data submitted with scientific papers. These recommendations typically include two elements: conceptual descriptions of metadata needs and representations of those concepts in community dialects (XML, JSON, RDF, …). Mapping between the recommended concepts is an important step towards converging towards a recommendation that is consistent across communities
• There are many different ways that metadata is created, vetted, used and distributed; and the complexity of this makes finding new efficiencies and systems implementation difficult
• Most groups face interoperability challenges with systems and processes
• There are silos within organizations themselves, making communications challenging

Possible solutions to explore

• Identify concepts included in relevant community and publisher recommendations
• Identify concepts shared across recommendations
• Comprehensive metadata mapping across community groups can be used as a tool to communicate with others internally and externally to explain the uses, or misuses of metadata in context
• Mapping can reveal the complexity of metadata use to researchers (and in some cases publishers and librarians) to underscore the importance of completeness and accuracy
• Mapping will also help identify key areas of inefficiency, breakages, or gaps that the groups can then collaborate to address in further interoperability-related projects

Group participants