A multi-level metadata approach for a Public Sector Information data infrastructure

Abstract

This paper describes an approach for representing and handling metadata about Public Sector Information data sets in a large scale data infrastructure as designed within ENGAGE, a project of the FP7 Research Infrastructures programme. A multi-level approach is adopted, allowing management of metadata at various levels of expressive power, and thus enabling different use cases and requirements to be served through a single platform. CERIF is being investigated as a common conceptual model to ensure information integration from diverse sources without loss of meaning and furthermore as the basis for the generation of Linked Open Data. Through detailed mappings from common metadata schemata used for PSI it is shown that CERIF is a data model suitable for representing rich contextual metadata for the domain of governmental datasets.