2. Metadata mapping

📌 Introduction

In this section, we describe the basics of metadata and explain what metadata mapping is. We also look at the Health-RI Core Metadata Schema and the metadata standards it builds upon. This page is intended for a general audience. For details on the standards and the schema, please visit pages dedicated for data experts.

🧠 What is metadata

Metadata is essentially data about data. It provides information that describes various aspects of your data, such as its description, 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 researchers, clinicians, and policymakers to derive meaningful insights from vast amounts of data while ensuring its integrity, reliability, and confidentiality.

🎯 HRI Metadata Set

The National Health Data Catalogue currently works with a Core Metadata Set. The Core Metadata Schema is a formal shared conceptualisation of the requirements to find and reuse information across Health-RI nodes via the national 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 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.

The set is split into several classes describing the data. At the moment four classes (Dataset, Catalogue, Resourse, and Agent are mandatory. Each class is populated by a set of mandatory and recommended variables. You can find all of the descriptions of variables and classes here. 

📋 What is metadata mapping

🔎 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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