Registry Metadata Quality Assessment by the Example of re3data.org Schema

Abstract

Nowadays, research data repositories (RDR) have become progressively widespread all over the world. To expand repository services and build up inbound linking strategy, organizations list their repositories with so called Global Registries. Accordingly, such registries should be carefully described by the related data. In this study, I explore the metadata schema of re3data.org. I collect and analyze descriptions from the listed repositories, and come up with some suggestions concerning possible improvements to the metadata schema. To accomplish this, I develop a crawler program, which collects necessary data from the re3data.org. Based on the analysis results, I have identified two issues that required elements is missing, one issue that required element value is missing when the corresponding property is applied, five inconsistency issues with re3data controlled vocabulary, six issues with undescribed optional elements, and two inconsistency issues between the elements and their attributes which do not pair with. I believe this discussion can facilitate improvements to the existing re3data.org schema and further help researchers who analyze data repository trends.

Keywords

• Data Repository
• Repository Registry
• Re3data.org