Proposed metadata enhancement suite

Submitted by admin on 5 November 2012 - 3:59pm

This use case outlines potential user requirements and technical development considerations for a proposed suite of metadata enhancement tools, designed to support automated extraction of metadata useful for repository deposit management and reporting. The proposed metadata enhancement suite would focus on requirements of several stakeholders in the Research Information Management (RIM) arena, who have firmly expressed their perceived need for metadata enhancement in current RIM systems (both Open Access repositories and CRIS).

Description

This use case aims to offer Institutional Repository (IR) managers a set of metadata enhancement services grouped into a RepNet Metadata Enhancement (RME) Suite. This proposed RME Suite, to be developed under the RepNet umbrella as part of the Project service catalogue, will provide the means (either automatic or otherwise) for filling in the gaps that a given IR metadata collection may have in various categories (such as DOIs, funder info, author ID, provenance or de-duplication services to mention a few).

Dependencies

  1. RIO Extension Guidelines for Metadata Enhancement. The RME Suite will require the RIO Extension Guidelines to be available and IR managers to be aware of the implications they have regarding the need to feature enhanced metadata sets in their IRs.
  2. Specific Third-party Metadata Enhancement Services. Some of the metadata enhancement services to be provided by the RME Suite will rely on external services provided by third-parties (such as CrossRef DOI Lookup or FundRef services).
  3. Metadata aggregation. One of the overlay services offered by metadata aggregation will be metadata validation with regard to RIOXX (or OpenAIRE v2) Guidelines. Failure to meet this metadata quality criteria should drive IR managers to resort to the RME Suite for metadata enhancement purposes.

Usefulness

The RME Suite provides a key service to IR managers in order to update/standardize their repository metadata sets following the RIOXX requirements. The RME Suite service will be useful for institutions, funders and the whole UK repository network (plus associated CRIS platforms) in their adaption to the post-Finch Open Access landscape. Finally, RME Suite implementation is critical for the RepNet Project, since RIOXX Guideline compliance lies at the base of every other repository service the RepNet has planned.

Usefulness for this app will be measured by the number of metadata enhancement operations performed (and IRs and HEIs served) by the service, as well as by the global increase in the rates of success in metadata validation from aggregation.

Feasibility

As noted above, this proposed RME Suite requires the RIOXX Guidelines to be released. In terms of project time schedule, however, this does not mean that the RME Suite specification process needs to wait for the RIOXX guidelines to be public, since there is already a clear picture of what the requirements will be in terms of metadata enhancement.

The way to ensure that this complex tool gets delivered within RepNet timescale is to make it a gradually developing service, which will start by offering the easier-to-develop features within the whole collection and then produce further enhancements so it evolves into a full-developed suite of services.