An Analysis of Crosswalks from Research Data Schemas to Schema.org

The increased number of data repositories has greatly increased the availability of open data. To enable broad discovery and access to research dataset, some data repositories have begun leveraging the web architecture by embedding structured metadata markup in dataset web landing pages using vocabularies from Schema.org and extensions. This paper aims to examine metadata interoperability for supporting global data discovery. Specifically, the paper reports a survey on which metadata schema has been adopted by participating data repositories, and presents an analysis of crosswalks from fourteen research data schemas to Schema.org. The analysis indicates most descriptive metadata are interoperable among the schemas, the most inconsistent mapping is the rights metadata, and a large gap exists in the structural metadata and controlled vocabularies to specify various property values. The analysis and collated crosswalks can serve as a reference for data repositories when they develop crosswalks from their own schemas to Schema.org, and provide the research data community a benchmark of structured metadata implementation.