Introduction to Workshop: Balancing Local Metadata Requirements with Universal Interoperability

This presentation was made at the COAR 2019 Annual Meeting & General Assembly, Lyon (France)

Interoperability is a key concern for our open-access repositories. One important foundation of this potential to interoperate with other systems is the creation and exposure of descriptive metadata, formatted according to standard "profiles" (a "profile" can be considered to be an agreed set of metadata properties and constraints or rules).

The metadata profiles used in repositories range from the very general to the more specific. The classic example of the former would be OAI-DC, which is the basic default profile produced by default by all repositories which allow metadata to be harvested via the ubiquitous OAI-PMH protocol. The more specific end of the range of profiles includes profiles which are designed to operate within a particular geo-political context (e.g. OpenAIRE; JPCOAR; RIOXX), or within a particular scholarly domain.

The global knowledge commons at the heart of COAR's mission certainly transcends geo-political borders, but there are other "borders" - for example between disciplines - and we need to be prepared to operate across these too.

The challenge for COAR, then, is to recognise and embrace the development of a rich and varied "economy" of metadata profiles, while at the same time developing a strategy to ensure that a sufficient level of interoperability between them can be identified and achieved.