The DAMES Metadata Approach

Abstract

The DAMES project will provide high quality data management activities services to the social science research community based on an e-social science infrastructure. The infrastructure is supported by the collection and use of metadata to describe datasets and other social science resources. This report reviews the metadata requirements of the DAMES services, reviews a number of metadata standards, and discusses how the selected standards can be used to support the DAMES services. The kinds of metadata focussed upon in this report include metadata for describing social science microdatasets and other resources such as data analysis processing instruction files, metadata for grouping and linking datasets, and metadata for describing the provenance of data as it is transformed through analytical procedures. The social science metadata standards reviewed include: • The Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM) • The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) versions 2 and 3 • Dublin Core • Encoded Archival Description (EAD) • e-Government Metadata Standard (e-GMS) • ELSST and HASSET • MAchine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) • Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) • MetaDater • Open Archives Initiative (OAI) • Open Archival Information System (OAIS) • Statistical Data and Metadata Exchange (SDMX) • Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) The review concludes that the DDI standard version 3.0 is the most appropriate one to be used in the DAMES project and explains how best to integrate the standard into the project. This includes a description of how to capture metadata upon resource registration, upgrade the metadata from accessible resources available throughthe GEODE project, use the metadata for resource discovery, and generate provenance metadata during data transformation procedures. In addition, a “metadata wizard” is described to help with data management activities.