METADATA WORKSHOP Conclusions Keith Jeffery Peter Wittenburg

Situation Many research infrastructures – RIs are expensive in construction and operation Producing data / information – Not used as much as should be – By researchers and citizens Problem is – Discovery – Contextualisation – Access – Provenance – Utilisation – Preservation  metadata One person’s metadata is another person’s data In the context of fast-increasing data volumes and complexity Requires automation  autonomic computing

Situation (2) For each RI – Currently developing separately data systems including metadata – Some commonality within domain – e.g. INSPIRE (geo-temporal) Collecting metadata is expensive and researchers do not like to provide it

Solution Converge development of metadata to allow commonality for: – Discovery – Context (research background) – Access (including rights, security, privacy, trust) – Provenance (to aid understanding and trust in quality) – {Utilisation} – Preservation (to ensure available and understandable) Utilisation likely to be domain-specific but some commonality e.g. Digital libraries of scholarly publications

Solution (2) Commonality – that which is horizontal across vertical RI data/information systems Metadata with – Formal syntax (to enable processing) Attributes of object (describing its properties) Relationships between objects (roles) Temporal information (for versioning, provenance) – Declared semantics (to enable understanding) Ontologies Authority files (With domain-specific metadata for utilisation) Good tools for metadata collection– automated and progressive (workflow) – and use

Way Forward: Questions Was it useful to get this community together?

Way Forward: Questions Was it useful to get this community together? Would it be useful to keep this community together?

Way Forward: Questions Was it useful to get this community together? Would it be useful to keep this community together? What should we do together? – Common approaches / best practice – Development of common standards where appropriate – Development of tools / services to utilise standards

Way Forward: Questions Was it useful to get this community together? Would it be useful to keep this community together? What should we do together? – Common approaches / best practice – Development of common standards where appropriate – Development of tools / services to utilise standards How should we do it together? grass-root analysis of approaches of different communities architecture, building blocks and protocols extracting a kind of reference architecture establishing guidelines for metadata quality building blocks and protocols IT principles and solutions ways of explicit semantics and flexible mapping raising awareness and disseminating messages conferences, workshops, hands-on training courses help in finding solutions and setting-up things

Way Forward: Questions Was it useful to get this community together? Would it be useful to keep this community together? What should we do together? – Common approaches / best practice – Development of common standards where appropriate – Development of tools / services to utilise standards How should we do it together? grass-root analysis of approaches of different communities architecture, building blocks and protocols extracting a kind of reference architecture establishing guidelines for metadata quality building blocks and protocols IT principles and solutions ways of explicit semantics and flexible mapping raising awareness and disseminating messages conferences, workshops, hands-on training courses help in finding solutions and setting-up things How to fund such activity? – EC FP7 Call bullet 3 (communities-driven policy/services) – Cooperative project or support action?