Joint Meeting on Metadata Standards in Use and Convergence

The Metadata Interest Group(MIG) is supported by individuals and organizations involved in the development, implementation, and use of metadata for scientific data.  MIG’s chief objective is to identify and endorse metadata solutions for addressing data management challenges. Metadata is crucial for the discovery, access, preservation, exchange, manipulation, and use/re-use of research data.  Metadata discussions frequently focus on community-specific issues such as discipline-specific standards; however, there are dimensions of metadata that are of general interest, cross disciplines, and are amenable to broad community input.  MIG endorses metadata solutions that balance domain-specific and interdisciplinary needs.

MIG has proposed metadata ‘packages’ for the commonly required purposes; a ‘package’ consists of elements (attributes or data structures) the values of which relate to the unique identity of the dataset or record (instance).  To assure machine processing a formal syntax and declared semantics are required, and the packages must exhibit referential and functional integrity as well as human readability.

At previous plenaries, MIG has reached out to other RDA Interest Groups and Working Groups where metadata is important to the goals of their group. The element set has been shared with and reviewed by many of the RDA domain groups. At this meeting, we will continue the conversation with the Social Science domain group as well as a large international project, Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo),  which represents 120 institutions in 21 countries.