Metadata Approaches To Describe And Organize Data Resource

With the rapid development of network technology and fast progress indigitalization of data resource, metadata acts as an approach describing the content ofdata resource and organizing them effectively, which is playing a more and moreimportant role in the data interchange and data sharing. The main topic of this paperconcerned with the design of metadata, especially the metadata describing theresource collections with multiple hierarchies and the metadata describing resourceobjects, and the framework to unify both of them.The paper firstly reviews some current research on the metadata theory, whichcan give us an insight into the tendency of the metadata technology and the problemunsolved in the national metadata projects. Metadata which is used to describe andorganize the data resource contains several important techniques, such as the DublinCore metadata, the metadata for collections, the methodology for metadata modeling,and the Zcollection metadata framework.Next, we concentrates on the approaches to design the metadata: The metadatacontent about the general descriptions, the long-term preservation, and the qualityevaluation of the data resource is analyzed for the convenience to design the objectmetadata;Michael Heaney's analytical model of collections and their catalogues isimproved to describe the characters of collections with multiple hierarchies;Furthermore, a framework based on Zcollection is studied to unify the two kinds ofdescriptive metadata and it's flexible structure.Finally, the characters and organization of the industrial data resource areanalyzed, and metadata is designed for this kind of data resource which is widely usedbut lack of effective ways to be shared. Then, motivated by the Zcollection framework,the Z39.50 profile to unify the two kinds of descriptive metadata mentioned above iscreated.