DataCite is an international organization responsible for the DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) issued for research datasets.  For each DOI issued, DataCite requires the data publisher to create and submit to DataCite descriptive metadata that can aid resource discovery.

The purpose of mapping DataCite metadata elements to ontology terms is to enable DataCite metadata to be published in RDF as Open Linked Data, enabling these metadata to be understood programmatically and integrated automatically with similar data from elsewhere.

In a previous blog post, I described the work that Silvio Peroni and I undertook in May 2011 to map the main terms from the DataCite Metadata Kernel v2.0 to RDF. To enable that, we created a ‘proto-ontology’, the DataCite Ontology version 0.2, that contained just the following four object properties: *

Is Data Publication the Right Metaphor? is an essay by Mark Parsons and Peter Fox to be published in the Data Science Journal, for which a preprint has been provided for open pre-publication community peer review at http://mp-datamatters.blogspot.com/2011/12/seeking-open-review-of-provocative-data.html.

In biology, the fields of macromolecular structural biology and sequence bioinformatics have, since the 1970s, had established international databases for the deposition of data, and journal policies mandating such deposition prior to acceptance for publication of manuscripts describing the data.  Similar good practices have developed more recently in other disciplines, notably astronomy.

Evidence submitted by David Shotton in response to the Royal Society’s Policy Study “Science as a Public Enterprise” Call for Evidence, addressing the following two topics raised by that call: Getting Researcher buy-in. How do we get researchers to be more willing to share data? What is there to be learned from disciplines such as genomics which have norms which favour wide sharing of data?

In a recent blog post, Heather Piwowar, in discussing the advantages of citing datasets in the reference list of the article, said “No journals have standardized on this approach so far”. However, Pensoft Journals, a publisher that specializes in publishing biodiversity and biological systematics papers, and that has taken the lead in promoting the publication of datasets with DOIs, has exactly such a policy.

The meaning of the word “dataset” is ambiguous, changing with context.

The DataCite Metadata Kernel version 2.0 [1] specifies the minimal metadata, and optional metadata, that should accompany a DataCite DOI for the identification of a published data entity. Within the Metadata Kernel document there is an XML mapping of these metadata terms, using DCMI Metadata Terms, and an example encoded in XML.

In addition to using CiTO and CiTO4Data to describe relationships of relevance to data entities, as discussed in the previous blog post, FaBiO, the FRBR aligned Bibliographic Ontology described elsewhere, another member of the suite of SPAR (Semantic Publishing and Referencing) Ontologies, also has a number of classes and properties specifically designed for addressing data, software, metadata and other non-bibliographic entities.