Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Analysis And Synthesis Of Metadata Goals For Scientific Data, Craig Willis, Jane Greenberg, Hollie C. White

Faculty Scholarship

The proliferation of discipline-specific metadata schemes contributes to artificial barriers that can impede interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. The authors considered this problem by examining the domains, objectives, and architectures of nine metadata schemes used to document scientific data in the physical, life, and social sciences. They used a mixed-methods content analysis and Greenberg’s (2005) metadata objectives, principles, domains, and architectural layout (MODAL) framework, and derived 22 metadata-related goals from textual content describing each metadata scheme. Relationships are identified between the domains (e.g., scientific discipline and type of data) and the categories of scheme objectives. For each strong correlation …