Metadata Made Easy - Develop and Use Domain Specific Metadata Schemes by
following the dmdScheme Approach
Abstract
1. Metadata plays an essential role in the long term preservation,
reuse, and interoperability of data. Nevertheless, creating useful
metadata can be sufficiently difficult and weakly-enough incentivised
that many datasets may be accompanied by little or no metadata. One key
challenge is, therefore, how to make metadata creation easier and more
valuable. We present a solution that involves creating domain specific
metadata schemes that are as complex as necessary and as simple as
possible. These goals are achieved by co-development between a metadata
expert and the researchers (i.e. the data creators). The final product
is a bespoke metadata scheme into which researchers can enter
information (and validate it) via the simplest of interfaces: a web
browser application and a spreadsheet. 2.We provide the R package
[‘dmdScheme‘](https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=dmdScheme)
[@Krug2019] for creating a template domain specific scheme. We
describe how to create a domain specific scheme from this template,
including the iterative co-development process, and the simple methods
for using the scheme, and simple methods for quality assessment,
improvement, and validation. 3.The process of developing a metadata
scheme following the outlined approach was successful, resulting in a
metadata scheme which is used for the data generated in our research
group. The validation quickly identifies forgotten metadata, as well as
inconsistent metadata, therefore improving the quality of the metadata.
Multiple output formats are available, including XML. 4. Making the
provision of metadata easier while also ensuring high quality must be a
priority for data curation initiatives. We show how both objectives are
achieved by very close collaboration between metadata experts and
researchers to create domain specific schemes. A near-future priority is
to provide methods to interface domain specific schemes with general
metadata schemes, such as the Ecological Metadata Language, to increase
interoperability.