Metadata schemes and Semantic Web: standardisation and specialization in the world of meta information

Abstract

The ability to semantically relate various data and metadata is a basic criterion of the Semantic Web concept. The most obvious and most urgent subtask in this area is to share and align metadata schemas used in digital libraries, collections and databases. As a result of international research activities, an RDF based framework is evolving which provides a common metadata schema definition format and the possibility to reuse existing schemas and schema elements. The Department of Distributed Systems of MTA SZTAKI tries to introduce these results in Hungary. Our open service provides metadata schema registration, overview of registered schemas and their interconnections. It can also support the creation of new schemas using elements also from existing schemas. Such service could facilitate the reuse and standardization of metadata schemas, which is of public utility, as it can make data management and data retrieval more economical.