Metadata and Federation

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Metadata and Federation
Interfaces to Scientific Data Archives
Workshop March 24-27, 1998 Pasadena California

• Break-out Group D

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Participants

• Lee Elson, JPL
• James Frew, UC Santa Barbara
• John Helly, SDSC
• Lennart Johnson, University of Houston
• François Ochsenbein, Obs. Astro. de Strasbourg
• Raymond Plante, NCSA
• Herbert Siegel, JPL
• Eric Van de Velde, Caltech
• Stuart Weibel, OCLC

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1. How does Metadata differ from Data?

• Metadata is structured data about data
• It is not an extensive property of the
  information per se, but rather describes a
  relationship among or between data sets
• Ergo the term meta-metadata is undefined, and
  its use should be dealt with harshly
• Metadata is distinguished from data by the
  context of use
• One persons data is another persons metadata

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3. How is metadata created?

• By people
• especially synthetic, classification or summary
  data
• By machines
• computational (algorithmic extraction or
  summarization)
• descriptive (size in bytes, recording mode of a
  device, time/date stamps, etc)

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5. What is a metadata standard?

• A controlled vocabulary for the description of
  related information resources
• Strongly typed attributes
• Represents an authoritative consensus within the
  domain of the standard
• Semantics
• Structure
• Syntax

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Metadata and Federation

• Federation autonomous, decentralized data
  repositories linked by common description schemas
• Federation as the mechanism of evolution of
  common metadata standards

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9. Role of metadata in assessment of data quality

• None
• Organizational authority plays a far greater role
• Federation as mechanism for evolving to common
  quality standards (hopefully increased standards!)

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Proposal of Group D

• Federation is crucial
• increases value of data,
• grass-root mechanism for evolving
• metadata standards
• quality standards
• As a help to metadata developers, ISDA should
  establish a web-based unmanaged repository of
  URLs to metadata developed for scientific data

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References to related information

• Dublin Core Homepage
• http//purl.org/metadata/dublin_core
• RDF Working Group Home Page
• http//www.w3.org/RDF
• IFLA Metadata Page
• search (IFLA and Metadata on your favorite web
  index)