Research Data Things 13/23 - Walking the Crosswalk

This thing asks us to explore the differences and variations between metadata schemas and the challenges of translating a record from one schema to another. Having done quite a lot of data mapping such as from people records from a student system to a library system this was not really a new experience for me...


via GIPHY


The exercise asked us to look at this record and map the fields into Dublin Core using this table.

Here are some observations about that process:

  • For a number of DC fields there was no data available in the source record.
  • The rights information in the source record was spread across four fields. Dublin Core has only one field for all of this information
  • The file format was not specified in the source record, but could potentially be extracted from the attachment file extensions with some programming
  • The kind of data was not specified in a field in the source record though it can be deduced from the title/description.
  • The source record contains several fields that have no equivalencies in Dublin Core.