EDI – A Template-Driven Metadata Editor for Research Data

Abstract

EDI is a general purpose, template-driven metadata editor for creating XML-based descriptions. Originally aimed at defining rich and standard metadata for geospatial resources, It can be easily customised in order to comply with a broad range of schemata and domains. EDI creates HTML5 [9] metadata forms with advanced assisted editing capabilities and compiles them into XML files. The examples included in the distribution implement profiles of the ISO 19139 standard for geographic information [14], such as core INSPIRE metadata [10], as well as the OGC [8] standard for sensor description, SensorML [11]. Templates (the blueprints for a specific metadata format) drive form behaviour by element data types and provide advanced features like codelists 1 underlying combo boxes or autocompletion functionalities. Virtually, the editing of any metadata format can be supported by creating a specific template.

A Practical Workflow for an Open Scientific Lifecycle Project: EcoNAOS

“…• We shared a subset of data by publishing in GET-IT the superficial (at the sea surface) value for each observation and for each parameter in the database. Metadata of the sensors are also shared in GET-IT, using Sensor Metadata Language (SensorML) edited by using the EDI interface [21,22], which is a powerful metadata editor, developed for RITMARE project as well. These metadata are accessible following this link: http://vesk.ve.ismar.cnr.it/sensors/.…”

Web-Scale Normalization of Geospatial Metadata Based on Semantics-Aware Data Sources

“…The EDImetadata editor [17] marked a breakthrough in assisted editing of metadata descriptions in the geospatial domain. In fact, besides being conceived of in the context of the Italian flagship project RITMARE (http://ritmare.it), EDI has been adopted so far by a number of projects, namely the FP7 projects ERMES (http://www.ermes-fp7space.eu/it/homepage/) and EuroFleets2 (http: //www.eurofleets.eu/np4/home.html), the H2020 project eLTER (http://www.lter-europe.net/ltereurope/projects/eLTER) and the Italian Flagship Project NextData (http://www.nextdataproject.it/).…”

“…The user is going to retrieve an empty result set when searching for the same theme in any other language (except, of course, in the case of apparent syntactic similarity), such as "Морски региони", the corresponding translation in Bulgarian. Instead, by issuing the query in Listing 5 to the SPARQL endpoint, the whole set of results produced by the geoportal is returned: The query is straightforward, matching the text representations of keywords with the search pattern (Lines [15][16][17], except that the search pattern can be matched against a broader range of language-dependent representations. Obviously, the breadth of the cross-language capabilities that are elicited by our RDF-based representation of metadata is dependent on the multilingual thesauri that are plugged into Liftboy templates.…”

“…Ex-ante semantic augmentation is enabled by EDI [17], a template-based metadata editor that can be tailored to any XML-based metadata schema. Instead, in this paper, we elaborate on ex-post semantic augmentation of metadata, a technique generally referred to as semantic lift, via a FOSS product named Liftboy and made available in our GitHub repository (https://github.com/SP7-Ritmare).…”

Describing Geospatial Assets in the Web of Data: A Metadata Management Scenario

“…Hence, in order to manage such diversity, we decided to abstract from the specific output format and create a general-purpose tool that, appropriately parameterised by a custom metadata schema definition, could render a web-based authoring tool in the browser and assist the user in providing the metadata. EDI (http://edidemo.get-it.it) [35], the editing tool described in this paper, is constituted by a client-side JavaScript application that can autonomously create the interface and connect to the data sources that are specified in the given template. A server-side component, written in Java, executes the actual translation of the user input in both the XML and RDF representations that are supported by our architecture.…”