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Syntactic and Semantic Conversion of Metadata

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Home » Plenaries » Syntactic and Semantic Conversion of Metadata
26 Jan 2021
Group(s) submitting the application: 
Metadata IG
Meeting objectives: 

The main objective of this session is to discuss the challenges of interconverting metadata by those who have tried to map between schemes at one point or another. The second objective of this session is to create a list of best practices.  The third objective is to compare the conversions discussed with the RDA Metadata Standards Catalog (MSC; under the MSCWG), which has a growing list of conversion tools and mappings.

There will be short presentations by those who do metadata conversions, sharing their methodology as well as the challenges. The presentations will cover a variety of domains and both semantic and syntactic conversion. The breakout sessions during the meeting are intended to discuss the challenges as well as mitigation strategies. We aim for consensus on a way forward.

Meeting agenda: 

Collaborative session notes: http://bit.ly/MIG_P17-Notes

  1. Welcome and Meeting Objectives ( 5 min)

  2. Review definitions of syntactic and semantic conversion (Keith Jeffery) (5 min)

  3. Short Presentations on existing syntactic and semantic conversion methods (35 min)

    • SSHOC  (Mari Kleemola) 

    • SEMAF (Daan Broeder)  

    • 3M/X3ML toolkit (Maria Theodoridou) 

    • CEDAR (John Graybeal) 

    • B2Find (Anna-Lena Flügel)

    • Metadata Standards Catalog converter (Alex Ball) 

  4. Breakouts to address the following items or others that result from presentations (35 min)

    • Challenges re: converter technologies

    • Best practices when converting

  5. Report back and Discussion (10 min)

 

Target Audience: 

Anyone interested in interoperability

Group chair serving as contact person: 
Rebecca Koskela
Brief introduction describing the activities and scope of the group: 

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. This Metadata Element Set intended to become an RDA recommendation.

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.

The Metadata Standards Catalog WG comes under the ‘umbrella’ of MIG.

Short Group Status: 

The Metadata Interest Group was established and endorsed in 2013. MIG serves as an umbrella group for all aspects of metadata for research data. In particular, it coordinates the efforts of the Working Groups concerned with metadata to provide a coherent approach to metadata. The Metadata Interest Group has spun off 2 working groups, the Metadata Standards Directory WG and the Metadata Standards Catalog.  Both of those groups have been completed and are in maintenance mode. New content continues to be added to the Metadata Standards Directory and a new version of the Metadata Catalog was released in 2020.

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.

Type of Meeting: 
Working meeting
Additional links to informative material: 

  1. Metadata Interest Group: https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups/metadata-ig.html

  2. Metadata Elements: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B8FnM3PsoL2dd2RnYVBmcjRMYXc?usp=sharing

  3. CEDAR: https://more.metadatacenter.org/tools-training/cedar-metadata-tools

  4. SSHOC: https://www.sshopencloud.eu/

  5. SSHOC: https://www.sshopencloud.eu/d31-sshoc-report-sshoc-data-interoperability-problems 

  6. FORTH: https://www.ics.forth.gr/isl/x3ml-toolkit 

  7. B2FIND: https://www.eudat.eu/services/b2find

  8. SEMAF: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4651421

Avoid conflict with the following group (1): 
FAIR Data Maturity Model WG
Meeting presenters: 
Alex Ball, Keith Jeffery, Rebecca Koskela, John Graybeal, Maria Theodoridou, Daan Broeder, Mari Kleemola, Anna-Lena Flügel
Contact for group (email): 
rkoskela@unm.edu
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