[BP - MET] - Best Practices - Guidance on the Provision of Metadata

Hi Bernadette, Carlos, Makx, all DWBP members,



I created a page on the wiki, "Best Practices – Guidance on the Provision
of Metadata", where we can put the information about this topic. I took the
liberty to define a prefix in the subject of the e-mails related to these
discussions: [BP- MET].



I would like to expose some thoughts that I think are related to the data
on the web ecosystem. I see a kind of data architecture that has three big
roles: a data Publisher, a data Consumer and a data Broker. The Broker is
the one that has information that can be used by the Consumer to find data
published by the Publisher.



As an example of Brokers we can think about implementations of CKAN, used
by data.gov, dados.gov.br, etc. CKAN has metadata (provided by Publishers)
that are useful for Consumers to find data. CKAN is a registry and can also
be a repository for the data to be consumed. Almost all use cases of DWBP
WG are examples of Brokers.



At the same time, data published in CKAN implementations can have multiple
formats, as CSV, for example. Once a Consumer chooses some data to use from
a Publisher, she needs another kind of metadata to understand how to access
the data and its semantics.



I propose to create categories and types of metadata. I see two categories:
metadata for search and metadata for use. Each of these categories would
have types of metadata. For example:



Metadata Types for Search

Human Content Description (free text)

Machine Content Description (vocabularies)

Provenance

License

Revenue

Credentials

Quality / Metrics

Release Schedule

Data Format

Data Access



Metadata Types for Use

URI Design Principles

Machine Access to Data

API specification

Format Specification



The Brokers itself have another kind of metadata about its own information.


Maybe in the future a Consumer will search for data no more in these
Brokers (with its catalogues) but they will use search engines that could
obtain the metadata (both the search and the use) using its crawlers. But
now, we have this heterogeneous world of data that is one of the
characteristic of the web since its beginning.



Contributions of all members of the DWBP WG will be appreciated.



Best Regards,

Laufer

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