Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Introducing a content integration process for a federation of agricultural institutional repositories

Aggregating metadata from various sources often raises practical issues, such as incompatibility between the different metadata application profiles (AP) used as well as quality aspects of the metadata used. In the case of repositories hosting agricultural-related content, the existence of various metadata AP with significant differences between them makes the effort of interconnecting these repositories a difficult task. 


This paper proposes a process for integrating different agricultural scientific content repositories and a workflow that should be followed in the context of populating the repository. Although the proposed solution refers to repositories with agricultural content, the same process can be followed in the case of repositories with different content. This process was proposed under the VOA3R project which is funded by the European Commission’s ICT PSP Programme.


Contributed by Vassilios Protonotarios, Laura Gavrilut, Ioannis N. Athanasiadis, Ilias 
Hatzakis and Miguel-Angel Sicilia.


View/download submitted paper from HERE.
Click HERE to evaluate the paper.

5 comments:

  1. This paper is focused on the specific content population methodology used in the VOA3R project. However, the use of figures and tables makes it really interesting and easy to read.

    The process followed in this process could be easily adopted and adapted by relevant projects which involve content population in their tasks.
    However, the Conclusions section is rather limited and could benefit from a slight elaboration. After all, there was enough information in this paper to cover a number of conclusions!

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  2. A very interesting paper, presenting a very important element, often missing from other papers: the metadata evaluation/validation procedure. The presented metadata evaluation tool (figure 10) is very interesting and we could use some more information about it, maybe in a follow up paper presenting in full detail the evaluation methodology, tools and results.

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  3. @Nikolaos Marianos: Thank you for your kind words regarding the paper. It is true that we also consider the evaluation process a really important aspect of (almost) all our procedures, including the content population.

    Please feel free to use/reuse any information available in this submission and contact us for further details.

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  4. I enjoyed reading the paper and looking forward to learning more about the outcomes of the project. Evaluating the use of metadata is extremely important. I would have liked to read more about the approaches and methods used in defining quality and assessment procedures. Based on my personal experience, entering this information for every resources is a very tedious process. I wonder how much of this can be automated as indicated in Fig. 5, beyond the completeness of a metadata record.

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  5. The suggested model it very interesting. We sugget to verify it within the existing scenarios of the content providers/aggregators in order to check if it can be sostenable, and to evaluate istitutional polity and their organizational structure.

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