The Development process of a Metadata Application Profile for the Social and Solidarity Economy

This chapter presents the process of developing a Metadata Application Profile for the Social and Solidarity Economy (DCAP-SSE) using Me4MAP, a method for developing Application Profiles that was being put forth by the authors. The DCAP-SSE and Me4MAP were developed iteratively, feeding new developments into each other. This paper presents how the DCAP-SSE was developed showing the steps followed through the development of the activities and the techniques used, and the final deliverables obtained at the end of each activity. It also presents the work-team and how each profile of the team contributed for the DCAP-SSE development process. The DCAP-SSE has been endorsed by the SSE community and new perspectives of SSE activities have been defined for future enlargement of the DCAP-SSE. At the time of writing this chapter, Linked Open SSE Data is being published, they are the first examples of use of the DCAP-SSE.

Application Profiles

Application profiles fulfill similar functions to other forms of metadata documentation, such as data dictionaries. The preference is for application profiles to be machine-readable and machine-actionable, so that they can provide validation and processing instructions, not unlike XML schema does for XML documents. These goals are behind the work of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative in the work that has been done over the last decade to develop application profiles for data that uses the Resource Description Framework model of the World Wide Web Consortium.

The Minimum Mandatory Metadata Sets for the KIM Project and RAIDmap

A Minimum Mandatory Metadata Set (M3S) was devised for the KIM (Knowledge and Information Management Through Life) Project to address two challenges. The first was to ensure the project's documents were sufficiently self-documented to allow them to be preserved in the long term. The second was to trial the M3S and supporting templates and tools as a possible approach that might be used by the aerospace, defence and construction industries. A different M3S was devised along similar principles by a later project called REDm-MED (Research Data Management for Mechanical Engineering Departments). The aim this time was to help specify a tool for documenting research data records and the associations between them, in support of both preservation and discovery. In both cases the emphasis was on collecting a minimal set of metadata at the time of object creation, on the understanding that later processes would be able to expand the set into a full metadata record.

Using Reverse Engineering to Define a Domain Model

This chapter presents the early stages of a metadata application profile (MAP) development that uses a process of reverse engineering. The context of this development is the European poetry, more specifically the poetry metrics and all dimensions that exist around this context. This community of practice has a certain number of digital repertoires that store this information and that are not interoperable. This chapter presents some steps of the definition of the MAP Domain Model. It shows how the developers having as starting point these repertoires, and by means of a reverse engineering process are modeling the functional requirements of each repertoire using the use-case modeling technique and are analyzing every database logical models to extract the conceptual model of each repertoire. The final goal is to develop a common conceptual model in order to use it as basis, together with other sources of information, for the definition of the Domain Model.

Involving Data Creators in an Ontology-Based Design Process for Metadata Models

Research data are the cornerstone of science and their current fast rate of production is disquieting researchers. Adequate research data management strongly depends on accurate metadata records that capture the production context of the datasets, thus enabling data interpretation and reuse. This chapter reports on the authors' experience in the development of the metadata models, formalized as ontologies, for several research domains, involving members from small research teams in the overall process. This process is instantiated with four case studies: vehicle simulation; hydrogen production; biological oceanography and social sciences. The authors also present a data description workflow that includes a research data management platform, named Dendro, where researchers can prepare their datasets for further deposit in external data repositories.

The Development of an Optimised Metadata Application Profile

This chapter describes an approach to the development of a metadata application profile. It is particularly concerned with the class of application profile which is optimised for a specific use-case, rather than those which are more concerned with supporting general interoperability in a broader domain. The example of the development of a particular application profile, RIOXX, is used to illustrate some of the methodology discussed. Much of the approach described in the chapter was designed during the course of the development of RIOXX. Issues which are given particular consideration include a focus on the close involvement of ‘implementors' (normally software developers), the adoption of ideas from agile software development, continuous testing and open development, and ongoing maintenance and sustainability “on a shoestring”.

Developing Metadata Application Profiles for Open Educational Resources Federated Repositories

With many Learning Object Repositories (LORs) implemented and maintained independently from different organizations or communities, valuable Learning Objects (LOs) are scattered over different LORs and making it difficult for end-users (namely, instructional designers, teachers and students) to easily find and access them. A suggested solution towards addressing this issue is to create federated LORs, which aim to harvest and aggregate LOs' metadata from different LORs towards facilitating LOs' discovery across these LORs through a single infrastructure. However, a challenging issue during the development of federated LORs is the design of appropriate metadata application profile (AP) which supports harvesting heterogeneous metadata records from the aggregated LORs. Thus, the aim of this book chapter is twofold, namely (a) to present a methodology for developing metadata APs that can be used in building federated LORs and (b) to present a case study from the implementation of the proposed methodology for the development of the metadata AP used by the OpenDiscoverySpace federated LOR.

A Methodology for Effective Metadata Design in Earth Observation

The satellite images have become an essential source of information to address and analyze environmental issues quickly, repeatedly and in a reliable way. The increasing number of remotely sensed images are the first impediments for data discovery, access and processing. In this context, it is critical to simplify efficient multi-sensors image-based data access and query processing to provide accessibility to a variety of users in remote sensing. Describing satellite images through a metadata application profile may leverage capabilities to promote easy use of satellite image for environmental analysis. Accordingly, an application profile conforming to the Dublin Core Application Profile guidelines and designed for Earth observations data have been developed. The aim is to provide insights of key methodological considerations in relation to the design of this profile called EOAP (Earth Observation Application Profile).