Find and Combine Vocabularies to Design Metadata Application Profiles using Schema Registries and LOD Resources

A metadata schema which defines constraints about metadata records is a fundamental resource for metadata interoperability. Building interoperable metadata schemas has been a main topic of the Dublin Core since its early days. It is important to make use of existing metadata schemas to develop a new schema in order to minimize newly defined metadata vocabularies, which is how DCMI has developed. In order to improve the usability of existing metadata schemas for developing new schemas, it is important to improve the usability of the publicly available, online information about metadata schemas. This study aimed to develop a technology to help metadata schema designers find useful metadata schemas and use them for the new metadata schema development. Key concepts used in this study are Description Set Profiles (DSP) as a formal basis of metadata schema and Linked Open Data (LOD) as a framework to connect metadata schema resources. In this paper, we discuss a search methodology to find useful metadata terms for a given application domain. We propose to apply two approaches – (1) search metadata terms and description set profiles using resources registered at schema registries and the like, and (2) search metadata terms using metadata instances included in a LOD dataset. We created a search scenario for metadata schema of fictions and applied the methodology to evaluate the methodology. This paper shows the methodology and its evaluation using the scenario after discussion of general requirements analysis and guidelines for metadata schema development.