The Common European Research Information Format is the standard that the EU recommends to its member states for recording information about research activity. Since version 1.6 it has included specific support for recording metadata for datasets.
The Data Package specification is a generic wrapper format for exchanging data. Although it supports arbitrary metadata, the format defines required, recommended, and optional fields for both the package as a whole and the resources contained within it.
A separate but linked specification provides a way to describe the columns of a data table; descriptions of this form can be included directly in the Data Package metadata.
A set of mandatory metadata that must be registered with the DataCite Metadata Store when minting a DOI persistent identifier for a dataset. The domain-agnostic properties were chosen for their ability to aid in accurate and consistent identification of data for citation and retrieval purposes.
Sponsored by the DataCite consortium, version 3.0 was recently released in 2013.
A basic, domain-agnostic standard which can be easily understood and implemented, and as such is one of the best known and most widely used metadata standards.
Sponsored by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, Dublin Core was published as ISO Standard 15836 in February 2009.
The Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) is a bibliographic metadata standard implemented in XML. It reimplements a subset of the elements of MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) using language-based tags instead of numeric ones, and groups them somewhat differently. It is intended both as a simplified version of MARC 21 and as a richer alternative to Dublin Core for applications such as metadata syndication/harvesting and the documentation of digital information packages.
It was developed in 2002 by the Library of Congress Network Development and MARC Standards Office along with a group of interested experts.
The goal of these standards is to expose the rich content in aggregations of Web resources to applications that support authoring, deposit, exchange, visualization, reuse, and preservation. The standards support the changing nature of scholarship and scholarly communication, and the need for cyberinfrastructure to support that scholarship, with the intent to develop standards that generalize across all web-based information including the increasing popular social networks of “Web 2.0”.
Some repositories have decided that current standards do not fit their metadata needs, and so have created their own requirements.
An application of Dublin Core designed to improve visibility and availability of online resources, originally adapted from the Australian Government Locator Service metadata standard for use in government agencies.
An application profile based on the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Abstract Model, used to describe multi-disciplinary data underlying peer-reviewed scientific and medical literature.
The OpenAIRE Guidelines are a suite of application profiles designed to allow research institutions to make their scholarly outputs visible through the OpenAIRE infrastructure. The profiles are based on established standards and designed to be used in conjunction with the OAI-PMH metadata harvesting protocol to foster FAIR principles:
While the focus of each profile is different, they allow for interlinking and the contextualization of research artefacts.
A profile of the Data Package specification, intended for exchanging tabular data in CSV (comma-separated values) format.
Current research information system implementing the CERIF standard. Originally developed by Avedas but now a product of Thomson Reuters.
A collection of libraries for working with Data Packages in various programming languages, and scripts for importing them into databases.
The Data Package Validator takes the URL of a Data Package and checks whether it conforms to the Data Package specification.
The Data Package Viewer takes the URL of a Data Package and provides a human-friendly view of it.
The Data Packagist is a Web-based tool for writing a Data Package descriptor file (datapackage.json).
RESTFUL API for registering datasets with the DataCite organization. The interface uses the DataCite Metadata Schema.
The DCMI Tools Community list of tools and software implementing Dublin Core.
Current research information system developed by Elsevier that implements the CERIF standard.
Geoportal Server is a standards-based, open source product that enables discovery and use of geospatial resources including data and services.
This service validates OAI-PMH metadata records against the OpenAIRE Guidelines for publication repositories, data archives and current research information systems.
Current research information system implementing the CERIF standard.
A multidisciplinary data repository for a consortium of universities in the Netherlands, using a metadata structure based on the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.
A collection of commonly used and example data sets packaged using the Data Package specification.
An online digital repository of multi-disciplinary research datasets produced at the University of Edinburgh, using a modified Dublin Core metadata catalogue.
The University of Southampton's multi-disciplinary Institutional Research Repository, using a profile of Dublin Core and administrative ePrints metadata.
An online portal for education and research on learning in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, using a profile of the Dublin Core Metadata Elements for resource and collections metadata.
A European Scholarly Communication Infrastructure that aggregates bibliographic metadata from a network of publication repositories, data archives and CRIS following the OpenAIRE Guidelines. Together with additional authoritative information, the objects and their relationships described by the metadata form an information space graph which can be traversed by users and accessed via APIs by other services. The metadata primarily support discovery and monitoring services.