Metadata Standards A Report from the Open Forum on Metadata Registries

摘要

Increasing reuse, improving interoperability and the improving the ability to compose simulations rapidly, flexibly and efficiently are key goals of DMSO's Composable Mission Space Environments (CMSE) initiative. The CMSE task is to identify issues related to "composability" and then target DMSO initiatives (and related research from other organizations) that the DMSO can influence that will lay the groundwork for meeting these goals. Metadata has been identified as a key enabler for semantic interoperability. The goal is to make model and data semantics explicit, documented and accessible as metadata. The semantic problems can then be converted into syntactic problems, allowing automated detection and resolution. Current metadata standards make it practical for many different people to consistently specify the content of metadata elements for tens of thousands of different Web pages, and also make it possible for users to search for and find information effectively. Metadata standards also makes it possible for electronic information resources to communicate their existence and their characteristics to other electronic applications or search tools and to permit information to migrate from one application or search system to another. This paper reports on the sixth annual Open Forum on Metadata Registries held 20-24 January 2003 in Santa Fe, New Mexico which explored the role of metadata registries and reported on new developments and applications. The Open Forum focused on registries, and evaluated various methods and options for representing metadata. We examine the existing metadata standards for making semantics explicit in metadata, and describe technologies that are now being used to extract or manipulate the resulting metadata to support semantic interoperability and examine their application to the Modeling and Simulation community.