Metadata Life Cycles, Use Cases and Hierarchies

Abstract

Abstract:The historic view of metadata as "data about data" is expanding to include data about other items that must be created, used, and understood throughout the data and project life cycles. In this context, metadata might better be defined as the structured and standard part of documentation, and the metadata life cycle can be described as the metadata content that is required for documentation in each phase of the project and data life cycles. This incremental approach to metadata creation is similar to the spiral model used in software development. Each phase also has distinct users and specific questions to which they need answers. In many cases, the metadata life cycle involves hierarchies where latter phases have increased numbers of items. The relationships between metadata in different phases can be captured through structure in the metadata standard, or through conventions for identifiers. Metadata creation and management can be streamlined and simplified by re-using metadata across many records. Many of these ideas have been developed to various degrees in several Geoscience disciplines and are being used in metadata for documenting the integrated life cycle of environmental research in the Arctic, including projects, collection sites, and datasets.

Mapping ISO 19115-1 geographic metadata standards to CodeMeta

“…The standards acknowledge that they are generic, and they include several mechanisms for extension to address specific needs of communities that build on the standards. The generic nature of these standards is reflected in the breadth of the codelist that can be used to describe the scope of a particular metadata record (see list in Model Characteristics Section above and Habermann, 2018a;Habermann, 2018b;Habermann, 2018c). The CodeMeta project recently proposed over sixty terms that can be used in metadata for software.…”

“…The ISO standard includes a scope element at the root of each record that gives the type of resource described by the metadata. The default scope is dataset, but other options include: aggregate, application, attribute, attributeType, collection, collectionHardware, collectionSession, coverage, dimensionGroup, document, feature, featureType, fieldSession, initiative, metadata, model, nonGeographicDataset, otherAggregate, platformSeries, product, productionSeries, propertyType, repository, sample, sensor, sensorSeries, series, service, software, tile, transferAggregate (see Habermann, 2018a;Habermann, 2018b;Habermann, 2018c). Mapping the CodeMeta vocabulary to the ISO standard is an initial step toward defining the content that could be included in ISO metadata records that describe software and applications, i.e., those where the scope is software.…”

“…The ISO Technical Committee 211 has developed generic metadata standards that are widely used for geographic data of many kinds. These standards were also designed as a foundation that can be built on to document many kinds of things and support many use cases (Habermann, 2018a;Habermann, 2018b;Habermann, 2018c).…”

Mapping ISO metadata standards to codemeta

“…ISO Technical Committee 211 has developed generic metadata standards that are 30 widely used for geographic data of many kinds. These standards were also designed to document 31 many kinds of things and support many use cases (Habermann, 2018).32 This paper describes a mapping between the conceptual model that underlies ISO metadata (ISO 33 19115-1) and Codemeta with the goal of facilitating the creation of codemeta-compliant 34 descriptions of software that is documented using the ISO standards. The communities that 35 developed these two metadata dialects share the important goal of comprehensive standards that 36 address multiple use cases for many disciplines.…”

“…ISO Technical Committee 211 has developed generic metadata standards that are 30 widely used for geographic data of many kinds. These standards were also designed to document 31 many kinds of things and support many use cases (Habermann, 2018).…”