The proliferation of discipline-specific metadata schemes contributes to artificial barriers that can impede interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. The authors considered this problem by examining the domains, objectives, and architectures of nine metadata schemes used to document scientific data in the physical, life, and social sciences. They used a mixed-methods content analysis and Greenberg's (2005) metadata objectives, principles, domains, and architectural layout (MODAL) framework, and derived 22 metadata-related goals from textual content describing each metadata scheme. Relationships are identified between the domains (e.g., scientific discipline and type of data) and the categories of scheme objectives. For each strong correlation (>0.6), a Fisher's exact test for nonparametric data was used to determine significance (p < .05).Significant relationships were found between the domains and objectives of the schemes. Schemes describing observational data are more likely to have "scheme harmonization" (compatibility and interoperability with related schemes) as an objective; schemes with the objective "abstraction" (a conceptual model exists separate from the technical implementation) also have the objective "sufficiency" (the scheme defines a minimal amount of information to meet the needs of the community); and schemes with the objective "data publication" do not have the objective "element refinement." The analysis indicates that many metadata-driven goals expressed by communities are independent of scientific discipline or the type of data, although they are constrained by historical community practices and workflows as well as the technological environment at the time of scheme creation. The analysis reveals 11 fundamental metadata goals for metadata documenting scientific data in support of sharing research data across disciplines and domains. The authors report these results and highlight the need for more metadata-related research, particularly in the context of recent funding agency policy changes.

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Relationships between terms and features are an essential component of thesauri, ontologies, and a range of controlled vocabularies. In this article, we describe ways to identify important concepts in documents using the relationships in a thesaurus or other vocabulary structures. We introduce a methodology for the analysis and modeling of the indexing process based on a weighted random walk algorithm. . We also introduce a thesaurus-centric matching algorithm intended to improve the quality of candidate concepts. In all cases, the weighted random walk improves automatic indexing performance over matching alone with an increase in average precision (AP) of 9% for HEP, 11% for MeSH, 35% for NALT, and 37% for AGROVOC. The results of the analysis support our hypothesis that subject indexing is in part a browsing process, and that using the vocabulary and its structure in a thesaurus contributes to the indexing process. The amount that the vocabulary structure contributes was found to differ among the 4 thesauri, possibly due to the vocabulary used in the corresponding thesauri and the structural relationships between the terms. Each of the thesauri and the manual indexing associated with it is characterized using the methods developed here.

We present and define a structured digital object, called a "Tale," for the dissemination and publication of computational scientific findings in the scholarly record. The Tale emerges from the NSF funded Whole Tale project (wholetale.org) which is developing a computational environment designed to capture the entire computational pipeline associated with a scientific experiment and thereby enable computational reproducibility. A Tale allows researchers to create and package code, data and information about the workflow and computational environment necessary to support, review, and recreate the computational results reported in published research. The Tale then captures the artifacts and information needed to facilitate understanding, transparency, and execution of the Tale for review and reproducibility at the time of publication.