Metadata as Linked Open Data: mapping disparate XML metadata registries into one RDF/OWL registry

The proliferation of different metadata schemas and models pose serious problems of interoperability. Maintaining isolated repositories with overlapping data is costly in terms of time and effort. In this paper, we describe how we have achieved a Linked Open Data version of metadata descriptions coming from heterogeneous sources, originally encoded in XML. The resulting model is much simpler than the original XSD schema and avoids problems typical of XML syntax, such as semantic ambiguity and order constraint. Moreover, the open world assumption of RDF/OWL allows to naturally integrate objects from different schemas and to add further extensions, facilitating merging of different models as well as linking to external data. Apart from the advantages in terms of interoperability and maintainability, the merged repository enables end-users to query multiple sources using a unified schema and is able to present them with implicit knowledge derived from the linked data. The approach we present here is easily scalable to any number of sources and schemas.