Open Data & Data Management

• Metadata is the data that you use to describe and document the research data you have collected.  It contains descriptive elements such as title, subject, format, location, access rights.
• Essential for discovering and re-using data. Without proper documentation data sets are useless to future researchers.
• Consists of a set of predefined elements that describe specific attributes of a resource
• Important part of your data management plan.  Establish a metadata strategy  in the beginning of a research project.
• A number of metadata standards available – Digital Curation Center lists metadata standards by discipline.

A metadata standard or schema is a set group of elements that have been standardized for a particular field. Additionally, some data repositories also have their own standards. If there is not a standard already in place for your data, there are several general purpose schemas that you can adapt to your needs.

Metadata Concept Map by Amanda Tarbet is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.