You may have been following the debate on the semantic web and its use in technical data. One semantic standard that does appear to have legs is the Dublin core metadata initiative. DCMI’s origins are in textual metadata—but it also has technical application. One such was featured at the DC-2013 conference held last month in Lisbon, Portugal where João Aguiar Castro (University of Porto) and others presented a paper on ‘Designing an application profile using qualified Dublin core using a case study of fracture mechanics datasets.’ The authors observe that metadata production for research datasets is a non-trivial exercise and in general researchers are unconcerned with data preservation.
A standard means of sharing data descriptors should make for interoperable data sets—but attention is required to ‘guarantee metadata comprehensiveness and accuracy.’ The result is a domain-specific DCMI application profile, along with curation tools for researchers to manage and describe their datasets. Note that the fracture studies in question do not relate directly to rock mechanics or non conventional exploration but rather to mechanical engineering. On the other hand, science is science and semantics is ... now what is it again?
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