I have volunteered to blog this session. So here it is. BTW this is my first blog!

In the thematic parallel session on Friday afternoon on METADATA, we shared and discussed which metadata standards we expected to use in our projects and ideas about which ones we could all be using, and ones we might not know about...but should.

Some fruitful exchanges were had over quite specific metadata standards for data description - schemas and specifications - and on the use of controlled vocabularies. Without these, powerful resource discovery is impossible.  Some of the metadata standards mentioned were:

Dublin Core; Datacite; Cerif; Data Documentation Initiative (DDI; social science, health); INSPIRE (geo); Moles (NERC); Core Scientific Data Model (CSDM) and I-CAT usage (STFC)

and Ontologies:

Climate Science project (name?); HASSET (social science thesaurus); SNOWMED-CT; does YouShare project have an ontology for software types? 

Our session agreed that we should try to agree, quite soon, on the use of some common top level generic descriptive elements/fields - e.g. for  'study/ research project/investigation' level metadata.  On the spot we agred that time period and geo-location would be vital. As we delve deeper into richer data-level description, different schemas would be appropriate.  However, even across specific domains we should try to ensure the use of commonly agreed schema, or at least undertake some mappings.  Most importantly we should be working with any international standards and not seek to write our own, if they already exist.  We should also see which ones have been RDFised.

The session agreed to pool its knowledge by completing a grid of metadata standards being used/planning to be used by all projects.  

ACTIONS:

1. Louise would take a first pass at a grid template and send this round for comment
2. Projects working in similar domains to consult each other about the use of metadata, early on
3. Simon to organise a Programme meeting to be held in early Spring 12 to discuss metadata further and gain some agreement.

Well, that really wasn't so painful!

EDIT: Regarding action point 1, there is now an open spreadsheet on JISC MRD project metadata usage