a practical approach to metadata management mark jessop prof. jim austin university of york
TRANSCRIPT
A Practical Approach to Metadata Management
Mark JessopProf. Jim AustinUniversity of York
Introduction
• Follow on from DAME/Broaden (York)• Neuroscience Domain• Aims to promote collaboration and enable sharing of
resources: Data, Analysis• Online Portal to store Data, Analysis Code, Experimental
protocols.• Current deployment: Upload and annotate experimental
data and apply security, search across data, analyse with services, share and download.
• Working on workflows and a common data format.
e - Neuroscience
• Neuroscience at start of e-science journey.
• Proprietary data formats.• Private Local data.• Primitive data annotation
(Metadata).• Desktop tools.
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A
B
A: Neuro-Scientists
B: Computer-Scientists
Metadata
• Metadata is essential to allow resource discovery, interpretation, evaluation and re-use.
• Resources (Data, Services, Workflows) must be adequately annotated.
• Metadata needs to searchable.• Metadata needs to be viewable!
Managing Metadata
• Comprehensive Metadata definition provided for each resource type.
• Electrophysiology data described by the MINI.– Based on FuGE object model (Materials, Data,
Protocols).• Services described by MIAOWS.
Metadata Systems
• Symba data archive tool integrated into CARMEN.– Implements FuGE-OM.– Early in development program.
• User trials revealed problems.– Form complexity.– Response times.
Metadata Systems Take 2
• Revisit Requirements– Capture Mini Schema.– Must be responsive.– Must be simple to use.– Must be able to re-use metadata.
• System built based on forms.• Generic metadata storage.• Search across schemas.
Implementation
• Form/Schema designer generates XML description of forms and schema.
• XML schema stored in a database.• Portal requests XML which is used to generate input
forms or to display existing metadata.
Were we Successful?
• Some users complete the full document.• Some users complete enough to facilitate searching.• Templates are widely used.• Many users re-use complete templates resulting in
repeated metadata.
Metadata for Services
• Combine WSDL and user metadata to describe services.• Generate invocation forms from metadata.
– Default parameters.– Validation.
• Search on function.• Metadata applied to Service output.
– Provenance.– Re-use.
Future Work
• Ontologies.• Organisation of metadata – prevent repeats.• Smarter templates.• Ways to encourage completion of full metadata.