Towards a Federation of Metadata Repositories: Addressing Technical Interoperability

The utilisation of metadata repositories increasingly promotes secondary use of routinely collected data. However, this has not yet solved the problem of data exchange across organisational boundaries. The local description of a metadata set must also be exchangeable for flawless data exchange. In previous work, a metadata exchange language QL(4)MDR was developed. This work aimed to examine the applicability of this exchange language. For this purpose, existing MDR implementations were identified and systematically inspected and roughly divided into two categories to distinguish between data integration and query integration. It has been shown that all the implementations can be adapted to QL(4)MDR. The integration of metadata is an important first step; it enables the exchange of information, which is so urgently needed for the further processing of instance data, from the metadata mappings to the transformation rules.