My latest publication (Dumontier et al., 2016) describes the process followed in developing the W3C Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG) community profile for dataset descriptions which was published last year. The diagram below provides a summary of the data model for describing datasets which covers 61 metadata terms drawn from 18 vocabularies.
The health care and life sciences community profile for dataset descriptions
Dumontier, Michel and Gray, Alasdair JG and Marshall, M Scott and Alexiev, Vladimir and Ansell, Peter and Bader, Gary and Baran, Joachim and Bolleman, Jerven T and Callahan, Alison and Cruz-Toledo, José and others
PeerJ, 4:e2331, PeerJ Inc., 2016
Access to consistent, high-quality metadata is critical to finding, understanding, and reusing scientific data. However, while there are many relevant vocabularies for the annotation of a dataset, none sufficiently captures all the necessary metadata. This prevents uniform indexing and querying of dataset repositories. Towards providing a practical guide for producing a high quality description of biomedical datasets, the W3C Semantic Web for Health Care and the Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG) identified Resource Description Framework (RDF) vocabularies that could be used to specify common metadata elements and their value sets. The resulting guideline covers elements of description, identification, attribution, versioning, provenance, and content summarization. This guideline reuses existing vocabularies, and is intended to meet key functional requirements including indexing, discovery, exchange, query, and retrieval of datasets, thereby enabling the publication of FAIR data. The resulting metadata profile is generic and could be used by other domains with an interest in providing machine readable descriptions of versioned datasets.
@article{Dumontier:HCLS-datadesc:PeerJ2016,
title = {The health care and life sciences community profile for dataset descriptions},
author = {Dumontier, Michel and Gray, Alasdair JG and Marshall, M Scott and Alexiev, Vladimir and Ansell, Peter and Bader, Gary and Baran, Joachim and Bolleman, Jerven T and Callahan, Alison and Cruz-Toledo, Jos{\'e} and others},
journal = {PeerJ},
volume = {4},
pages = {e2331},
year = {2016},
month = aug,
url = {https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.2331},
doi = {10.7717/peerj.2331},
publisher = {PeerJ Inc.}
}
About Me
I'm an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University. My research focuses on linking datasets.
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