Ontology-Enabled Metadata Schema Generator: The Design Approach

Metadata standards are important for normalizing descriptions of publications and research data and for information discovery and use. Large, complex metadata standards, however, can complicate the creation, sharing, and maintenance of metadata and incur high costs for metadata operations, especially in the domain of scientific data. One strategy to solve the problems of large, complex metadata standards is to break them into independent modules to allow for reuse of elements and maximal possibility of automation. To implement this strategy, we need a metadata infrastructure that contains elements, vocabularies, and other metadata artifacts and that is easy to use. This short paper describes the design approach to an ontology-enabled metadata schema generator as part of the metadata infrastructure.