The Open Metadata Registry is a fundamental piece of technical infrastructure for the Semantic Web. While originally built to support the National Science Digital Library (NSDL), the Registry is available openly and to all who wish to use its services.
The Registry provides a means for to identify, declare and publish through registration their metadata schemas (element/property sets), schemes (controlled vocabularies) and Application Profiles (APs). In addition to supporting registration of schemes, schemas and APs for consumption and use by human and machine agents, the Open Registry will support the machine mapping of relationships among terms and concepts in those schemes (semantic mappings) and schemas (crosswalks). Thus, the Registry will support the key goals of metadata discovery, reuse, standardization and interoperability locally and globally.
The Registry used as its inspiration the open-source Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) Registry. The Registry extended the original DCMI goals to support: (1) the automated creation and maintenance of schemas and application profiles; and (2) the submission of schemas and schemes to a registry workflow for review and publication. All of the development work leverages the latest knowledge and standards for networked knowledge organization systems, schema and application profile declaration, and registry development.
The Open Metadata Registry project was funded by the National Science Foundation for its first three years. It is currently managed by Metadata Management Associates, a consulting partnership committed to maintaining the Registry as an open system.
