D6.2 Integrated Metadata Model

This document contains a summary of the domain specific metadata model for religious studies intended for the ReIReS data repository and data exploration and discovery service developed in WP6 hereafter referred to as the ReIReS unified discovery environment. Numerous digital resources and databases are already available in the domain of religious studies. However, these resources and datasets are dispersed across the web and the metadata available for their retrieval is of a semantically heterogeneous nature because of the lack of a common data model and reference ontologies in the domain of religious studies.  
WP6 aims to address the growing need of scholars to discover large sets of data and to provide public and commercial database providers a way to make their databases more visible and discoverable. This requires a domain specific metadata exchange model for providing a fully documented and standardized way of sharing metadata between platforms and people. In this document we describe the steps taken for the creation of this data model, as well as the model itself.
The first part focusses on the methodology used and steps taken in creating a data model for the purpose of a ReIReS unified discovery environment. This process mainly consisted of the analysis of the existing in-house models used by the consortium partners and the study of metadata standards and ontologies that could serve as basis for defining a ReIReS application profile for metadata. WP6 focused on a pilot project consisting of three datasets, chosen based on a data survey of the collections managed by the consortium members. The creation of an application profile needs to take into account the data as it is currently organized, as well as the standards set by existing data models, and consider those factors from the perspective of use cases and possible scenarios for the application of that metadata.  
In other words, we look at the metadata we have at our disposal and organize it in such a way as to index it and make it searchable according to the requirements relevant to the field of religious studies. Based on those requirements, we studied existing standards and data models to serve as a basis for a ReIReS application profile. The result of this was then presented to partners interested in WP6 to gather input and feedback.
The second part of this document specifies the domain specific application profile developed in WP6 for the harmonization of and access to the partners’ datasets in the ReIReS unified discovery environment. The choice for the Schema.org ontology as the base ontology is motivated based on the requirements of the project. The ReIReS application profile includes elements for indexing and display of metadata.  
The remainder of the document describes the actual metadata elements and their implementation as well as the mandatory, recommended and optional elements to which the data providers’ metadata must comply when contributing data to the unified discovery environment. This constitutes the formal specification of the ReIReS data model and lists the classes and properties used for the different types of records.