Introduction

ISO/IEC 11179‑3 specifies the structure of a Metadata registry and provides a metamodel for registry common facilities. This metamodel is intended to be extended by other parts of ISO/IEC 11179 for specific purposes.

This document provides a specification of the extensions to the registry metamodel specified in ISO/IEC 11179‑3 to enable the registration of metadata about data sets. These data sets can be part of a government-led open data initiative, or can be data sets that are used within and across organizations for commercial, scientific or academic purposes.

There is a requirement for metadata about these data sets to be readily available to enable the consistent and appropriate use of data and information, and to prevent duplication of work. Having an enhanced Metadata Registry where metadata that describes data sets is registered will facilitate the discovery of appropriate data sets.

The facilities described in this document, together with those described in ISO/IEC 11179‑3, ISO/IEC 11179‑31 and ISO/IEC 11179‑35, provide the ability to record the following information about data sets:

— one or more unique identifiers for the data set;
— the designation or title of the data set;
— a definition or description of the data set that provides sufficient detail to enable a user to quickly understand whether this data set is of interest;
— the date the data set was issued and, if appropriate, the date that subsequent versions of the data set were, or will be, issued;
— the access level and rights associated with the data set;
— the provenance of the data set, i.e. information about the place and time of the origin of the data set, its ownership and the method of the generation of the set;
— a set of keywords or tags that help to explain the data set;
— the language or languages used to describe the data set;
— the temporal and spatial coverages of the data set;
— the accrual periodicity of the data set, i.e., the frequency at which new, revised or updated versions of the data set are made available;
— the details of the distributions of the data set, including the identifier, the title, a description, the media type or file format, the size, the issue date, languages, access level and rights and access and download URLs;
— annotations drawn from a concept system, such as an ontology, to describe the theme or category of the data set or the collection of data sets;
— the details of any contexts, such as a programme, project or business area that use the data set;
— the details of any quality, fitness for role or risk assessments made in respect of the data set;
— any additional descriptions of the data set, including:
- — any data elements that are already registered that are included in the data set;
- — any information models that describe the structure of the information in the data set;
- — any documents which describe aspects of the data set, such as technical information about the data set or developer documentation such as a graphical representation of the data model of the data set;
— the details of any superset/subset hierarchies containing the data set;
— the details of any replacement data set if this data set is superseded;
— the details of any collection of data sets of which this data set is a part, including the identifiers, the designation or title, a definition or description, issue dates, languages, access level, rights, the spatial coverage, the provenance and any quality assessments of the collection.

This document was prepared taking into account concepts described in the following documents:

— Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT)^[¹^] [published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)];
— The PROV Ontology (Prov-O)^[²^] [published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)];
— The PROV Data Model (Prov-DM)^[³^] [published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)];
— Project Open Data Metadata Schema v1.1^[⁴^] (published by the US Government).

Supplementary material is provided in the annexes as follows:

— Annex A provides a consolidated class hierarchy for the classes specified in this document;
— Annex B provides two examples of the registration of data sets using the facilities specified in this document;
— Annex C provides a complete description of how the concept of provenance can be captured using the facilities specified in this document.

In Clauses 6 and 7 and Annex C, this document uses:

— bold font to highlight terms which represent metadata objects specified by the metamodel;
— normal font for terms which represent concepts defined in Clause 3.

EXAMPLE

Data_Set (7.2.2.3) is a class each instance of which models a data set.

BS ISO/IEC 11179-33:2023

Information technology. Metadata registries (MDR) - Metamodel for data set registration

Current

Published:

28 Feb 2023