Comparative Study of Metadata for Scientific Information The place of CERIF in CRISs and Sc.pdf

Comparative Study of Metadata for Scientific Information: The place of CERIF in CRISs and Scientific Repositories Keith G Jeffery CLRC, Andrei Lopatenko MU, Anne Asserson, UiB Summary Metadata provides the human- and machine-accessible gateway to data, improves data to information, and provides the semantic context within which knowledge can be induced from information. Metadata is the means for using together scientific data from heterogeneous sources. A CRIS commonly holds data which, while useful in itself, commonly is also metadata describing more detailed data and information on projects, persons, organizations, products of RD (patents, products, publications) equipment used for RD and RD funding. It is important, therefore, to classify the metadata formats used in various scientific repositories in order to understand their scope and interoperability, and their relationship to CERIF representing CRISs. Metadata formats are reviewed according to intention, abstraction level and technology criteria. The place of CERIF in CRISs in this wider sense (including scientific repositories) is considered and compared with other metadata models and formats. The superiority of CERIF (in formalism and flexibility) is demonstrated. 1 Introduction 1.1 Data, Information and Knowledge Europe is encouraged to evolve to ‘the knowledge society’. In order to reach this state it is necessary to take data and convert it to information by structuring within context. For example ’06-03-2002’ would mean to a USA user 3 June 2002 but to a European 6 March 2002. Indicating which digits represent day, month and year by use of metadata (e.g. mm-dd-yyyy or dd-mm-yyyy) structures the data and makes it comprehensible. Of course, the