IEA Task 43 Glossary
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  • Types of Metadata
  • The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
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  1. Terms

Metadata

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Last updated 2 years ago

Data that provides information about other data [].

Metadata is structured (and often standardised) information associated with a (data) resource, that provides information about the resource itself.

Metadata provides and (which may be general or domain-specific) for its resource.

Purpose

Metadata allows you to:

  • Make resources , by providing a high-level overview which can be inserted into a search index

  • Make resources , by providing information about how they were generated in the first place.

Thinking about types of metadata allows you to:

  • Decide who should be produce metadata and when that should happen

Types of Metadata

A 'type' of metadata is a broad-brush classification of what a metadata element is for and (correspondingly) who might create it and when. The project describes three different types of metadata, Administrative, Description and Structural. Wikipedia !

How To Fair's Structural metadata description incorporates two aspects, we've differentiated them into "provenance" and "form" to help highlight the different roles and times.

Administrative metadata is relevant for managing data, for example:

  • Project

  • Resource owner

  • Collaborators

  • Funder

  • Organisation

  • License

These can usually be assigned before you collect or create the data resource itself.

Descriptive (citation) metadata allows people to discover and identify the resource:

  • Author

  • Title

  • Abstract

  • Keywords

  • Topic

  • Persistent identifier

  • Related resources

These are usually assigned at the point of publication.

Tip

To facilitate data discovery, descriptive metadata can be made far more powerful than merely a citation.

For example, "find data containing rainfall in Africa last year" requires that a search index or graph is populated with temporal and locational values extracted from the data or its structural metadata.

In such cases "structural" metadata might also be thought of as "descriptive", and the lines blur between them. Extra search fields might include, for example:

  • Datetimes or ranges

  • Geolocations

  • External conditions

  • Other content-derived fields

  • Data type

Structural (provenance) metadata describes how a resource came about, for example:

  • Collection method

  • Sampling procedure

  • Assumptions made

  • Researcher notes

These metadata have to be gathered by the researchers according to best practice in their research community. They should be added continuously throughout data generation and processing.

Tip

Structural (form) metadata describes how a resource is internally structured, for example:

  • Data size

  • Storage details (eg file types, encodings and/or database details)

  • Content and format (data structure)

    • Specified directly, by listing Categories, Variables, Column Names, Types, Relations etc, or

Structural (form) metadata arises from the decisions taken by the data engineering team, who should architect their infrastructure in close collaboration with researchers to anticipate size, content and format.

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative

See the Dublin Core elements
  • Contributor

  • Coverage

  • Creator

  • Date

  • Description

  • Format

  • Identifier

  • Language

  • Publisher

  • Relation

  • Rights

  • Source

  • Subject

  • Title

  • Type

Purpose

The Dublin Core allows you to:

  • Quickly define a set of metadata to make a published data resource findable

Tip

It is also possible to use schema in a different way - not to describe the resource itself, but to describe the associated metadata!

Useful syntaxes for metadata

We think the following syntaxes will be most useful for definition (but this is by no means an exhaustive list):

The used in defining the data and its structural metadata should provide meaning and context to the data in a formal and machine-readable way. However, where richer meaning or context is difficult or impossible to formally capture, this structural metadata should be used to convey such information.

Specified indirectly, by referencing an external or .

These details should (ideally) be established a priori to data generation (see "), but may evolve throughout the lifetime of a resource.

The is an organisation dedicated to metadata. They give a . If publishing a data resource on the web, these elements serve as a guide for metadata should be included in order to best facilitate information discovery.

See the for full descriptions.

Whilst metadata need not be limited to this (particularly in cases where rich can be used to query for datasets, as opposed to search based methods), adhering to the Dublin Core should ensure a good search ranking and help you conform to the .

As discussed in , a can be an important element of your metadata, for describing the content of the data resource.

This allows you to check that the provided metadata is correct. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative for just this purpose.

wikipedia
context
pragmatics
findable
reusable
How To Fair
defines many more
semantics
schema
ontology
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
set of fifteen widely used metadata elements
DCMI elements page
publish schema
OWL (Web Ontology Language)
JSON (Javascript Object Notation)
OpenGraph
FAIR principles
descriptive metadata
schema
Structural (form) metadata
"de-risking a project