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 Toward Unified Metadata for the Department of Defense
Link to this resource Data sharing within and among large organizations is possible only if adequate metadata is captured. But administrative and technological boundaries have increased the cost and reduced the effectiveness of metadata exploitation. We examine practices in the Department of Defense (DOD) and in industry's Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) to explore pragmatic difficulties in three major areas: the collection of metadata; the use of intermediary transfer structures such as formatted messages and file exchange formats; and the adoption of standards such as IDEF1X-97. We realize that in large organizations, a complete metadata specification will need to evolve gradually. We are concerned here with initial steps. We therefore propose a simple framework, for both databases and transfer structures, which can accommodate varying degrees of metadata specification. We then propose some conceptually simple (but rarely practiced) techniques and policies to increase metadata reusability within this framework.  | This older paper takes a DoD/ISO/databases perspective on the problem of mediation between metadata schemas. |  |
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