1. A Practical Approach to Metadata Management Mark Jessop Prof. Jim Austin University of York

2. Introduction Follow on from DAME/Broaden (York) Neuroscience Domain Aims to promote collaboration and enable sharing of resources: Data, Analysis Online Portal to store Data, Analysis Code, Experimental protocols. Current deployment: Upload and annotate experimental data and apply security, search across data, analyse with services, share and download. Working on workflows and a common data format.

3. e - Neuroscience Neuroscience at start of e- science journey. Proprietary data formats. Private Local data. Primitive data annotation (Metadata). Desktop tools. x x x x x A B A: Neuro-Scientists B: Computer-Scientists

4. Metadata Metadata is essential to allow resource discovery, interpretation, evaluation and re-use. Resources (Data, Services, Workflows) must be adequately annotated. Metadata needs to searchable. Metadata needs to be viewable!

5. Managing Metadata Comprehensive Metadata definition provided for each resource type. Electrophysiology data described by the MINI. –Based on FuGE object model (Materials, Data, Protocols). Services described by MIAOWS.

6. Metadata Systems Symba data archive tool integrated into CARMEN. –Implements FuGE-OM. –Early in development program. User trials revealed problems. –Form complexity. –Response times.

7. Metadata Systems Take 2 Revisit Requirements –Capture Mini Schema. –Must be responsive. –Must be simple to use. –Must be able to re-use metadata. System built based on forms. Generic metadata storage. Search across schemas.

8. Implementation Form/Schema designer generates XML description of forms and schema. XML schema stored in a database. Portal requests XML which is used to generate input forms or to display existing metadata.

9. Were we Successful? Some users complete the full document. Some users complete enough to facilitate searching. Templates are widely used. Many users re-use complete templates resulting in repeated metadata.

10. Metadata for Services Combine WSDL and user metadata to describe services. Generate invocation forms from metadata. –Default parameters. –Validation. Search on function. Metadata applied to Service output. –Provenance. –Re-use.

11. Future Work Ontologies. Organisation of metadata – prevent repeats. Smarter templates. Ways to encourage completion of full metadata.

12. CARMEN Consortium www.carmen.org.uk Demos on White Rose Grid Stand 15:00.