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Metadata is essentially data about data. It provides information that describes various aspects of your data, such as its description, the owner of the data, the type of data. In other words, metadata helps in understanding and managing data effectively by providing additional information about it.
Metadata serves as the backbone of effective data management and analysis in the life sciences and healthcare domains, enabling . It enables researchers, clinicians, and policymakers to derive meaningful insights from vast amounts of data while ensuring its integrity, reliability , and confidentiality.
🔎 Metadata standards
A metadata standard is a set of rules, guidelines , and conventions that define how metadata should be structured, formatted , and described within a particular domain or context. These standards ensure consistency, interoperability , and effective management of metadata across different systems, organizations , and disciplines.
Here are some common metadata standards we use at Health-RI:
Dublin Core (DC): Dublin Core is a widely used metadata standard designed to provide a simple and standardized way to describe digital resources such as documents, web pages, images, videos , and other types of content on the internet. It was originally developed in 1995 by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI)
DCAT: Data Catalog Vocabulary , is a metadata standard specifically designed for describing datasets and data catalogs on the web. DCAT is based on the RDF (Resource Description Framework), which is is a standard model for representing and exchanging metadata and data on the web in a machine-readable format.
DCAT-AP: DCAT Application Profile for Data Portals in Europe , is a metadata standard developed by the European Commission to facilitate the interoperability of data catalogs and portals across European countries. It builds upon the DCAT (Data Catalog Vocabulary) standard and extends it with additional requirements and recommendations tailored to the European context.
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The National Health Data Catalogue currently works with a Core Metadata Set. The This Core Metadata Schema is a formal shared conceptualisation of the requirements to find and reuse information across Health-RI nodes via the national catalogueNational Catalogue. It represents a set of minimal elements for describing each resource (including dataset) with common metadata. The current version of the Core metadata schema Metadata Schema includes DCAT v3 and some selected DCAT-AP mandatory classes and their definitions. DCAT v3 is a data catalogue vocabulary with DCAT-AP being an application profile for describing public sector datasets in Europe.
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Metadata mapping and creation of a metatada metadata schema will likely require involment involvement of a semantic expert, data steward or equivalent. |
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For example, this is a simple metadata of a blood a sample, it . It describes the important information about the sample including ID of the sample, ID of the patient and a diagnosis:
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Here is the same data mapped towards the DCAT-AP standard as a dataset, it . It contains the same information and adds some mandatory variables like description. However, now this data can be easily processed by a computer and is in a format that is common for many places on the web.
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To map your metadata you first need to understand the structure of your metadata and their semantic meaning and the ontology (vocabulary) used to to describe your data in a Resource Description Framework (RDF), in our case DCAT V3, format. The general outline of the mapping pipeline can be found here: https://health-ri.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FSD/pages/edit-v2/290291734?draftShareId=ff45a2e2-80ee-49aa-b6d6-c04dedb6f9f8
Next steps
After mapping transfroming transforming your data properties to the classes and variables of the HRI model you need to validate your model. This step ensures that the new model both accurately represent the original data as well as adheres to the HRI metadata structure.
Once your RDF data is ready, you can publish your data to an FDP where it can be harvested by the catalogueCatalogue. More information about this step can be found here: 3. Exposing metadata
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