An open repository model for acquiring knowledge about scientific experiments

Abstract

The availability of high-quality metadata is key to facilitating discovery in the large variety of scientific datasets that are increasingly becoming publicly available. However, despite the recent focus on metadata, the diversity of metadata representation formats and the poor support for semantic markup typically result in metadata that are of poor quality. There is a pressing need for a metadata representation format that provides strong interoperation capabilities together with robust semantic underpinnings. In this paper, we describe such a format, together with open-source Web-based tools that support the acquisition, search, and management of metadata. We outline an initial evaluation using metadata from a variety of biomedical repositories.