A metadata best practice for a scientific data repository

Abstract

Digital data repositories ought to support immediate operational needs and long-term project goals. This paper presents the Dryad repository's metadata best practice balancing of these two needs. The paper reviews background work exploring the meaning of science, characterizing data, and highlighting data curation metadata challenges. The Dryad repository is introduced, and the initiative's metadata best practice and underlying rationales are described. Dryad's metadata approach includes two prongs: one addressing the long-term goal to align with the Semantic Web via a metadata application profile; and another addressing the immediate need to make content available in D Space via an extensible markup language (XML) schema. The conclusion summarizes limitations and advantages of the two prongs underlying Dryad's metadata effort. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.