Find and Combine Vocabularies to Design Metadata Application Profiles using Schema Registries and LOD Resources

Abstract

Metadata schema which defines constraints about metadata records is a fundamental resource for metadata interoperability. Building interoperable metadata schema has been a main topic of the Dublin Core since its early days. It is important to make use of existing metadata schema to develop a new schema in order to minimize newly defines metadata vocabularies, which is a very basic consensus that DCMI has developed. In order to improve usability of existing metadata schemas to develop new schemas, it is important to improve usability of information about metadata schema publicly available on the Internet. This study is aimed to develop a technology to help metadata schema designers find useful metadata schemas and use those schemas for the metadata schema development. Key concepts used in this study are Description Set Profiles (DSP) as a formal basis of metadata schema and Linked Open Data (LOD) as a framework to connect metadata schema resources. In this paper, we first analyse requirements for metadata schema search and reuse following introduction and discussion on related works. Then, it presents a set of guidelines to find and combine metadata vocabularies and a technology to help develop metadata schemas.