What is the IEMSR?

IEMSR stands for 'Information Environment Metadata Schema Registry'. The IEMSR is a prototype service that is designed to collect and serve information about metadata sets such as: metadata schemas, application profiles, metadata elements and encodings.

Why use a metadata schema registry?

We realise that many people -- not just those who are designing new metadata sets -- are looking for information about metadata. If this is you, if you've ever wondered what happened to the 'Simple' in 'Simple DC', how to build an application profile, or how to express Dublin Core in RDF, then we'd like to hear from you.

New application profiles are developed for all sorts of reasons. Inevitably they use many of the same existing metadata elements. It is not unusual to have a choice of several similar elements for describing a given piece of information. If you are faced with designing a new application profile or vocabulary, you will have to choose which vocabulary elements to use, or whether to create a new vocabulary for your purposes. A place that collects information about metadata makes it easier to find and reuse existing work, improving interoperability and reducing duplication of effort.

That's where the Metadata Schema Registry comes in. It pulls together information from many sources, enables access to data using standard interface APIs such as SPARQL and REST, and provides a means to use that information to review existing metadata sets, and to create new vocabularies, APs and schemas to meet user needs.

If you're designing metadata, the IEMSR project aims to support the full metadata engineering lifecycle, from requirements collection to evaluation via development. If you're using metadata, we can provide documentation in an easy-to-embed machine-readable XML-based format.

We believe that services succeed or fail based on their relevance to users. As IEMSR develops, it will benefit from taking your use cases and wishes into account. Your feedback and experience are invaluable.

PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
PREFIX iemsr: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/iemsr/terms/> 
PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
PREFIX dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>
SELECT $n $title $description $administrator $administratorURI 
$definedBy $specifiedBy $ch $chid $chidname
WHERE { 
	$n rdf:type iemsr:DCAP . 
	$n dc:title $title . 
	$n dc:description $description . 
	$ch iemsr:isMemberOf $n
	$ch rdf:type iemsr:PropertyUsage .
	$ch iemsr:uses $chid .
	$chid rdfs:label $chidname .

	OPTIONAL { $n dc:publisher $administratorURI . }
	OPTIONAL { $administratorURI rdfs:label $administrator . }
}