An Overview of DC-Based e-Government Metadata Standards and Initiatives

Abstract

Metadata are “data about data” or “information about information”. In the public sector, metadata may be used amongst others for the discovery and retrieval of governmental information. An increasing number of governments worldwide recognize the role of establishing a metadata standard as an integral ingredient of their interoperability framework towards realizing their eGovernment strategy. This paper presents an overview and comparison of eGovernment metadata initiatives throughout the world. Most metadata initiatives worldwide are currently based on Dublin Core (DC) thus in this study only standards based on Dublin Core are considered. We start by reviewing Dublin Core and the work within the Dublin Core – Government Working Group. We thereafter review national metadata standards and compare them with Dublin Core. We finally present a metadata element set that has been proposed by the European Committee for Standardization (CEN).