About The Registry

The NSDL Metadata Registry is a fundamental piece of the NSDL core technical architecture.

The Registry will complement the existing NSDL Metadata Repository by providing a means for NSDL and its affiliated projects to identify, declare and publish through registration their metadata schemas (element/property sets) and schemes (controlled vocabularies). In addition to supporting registration of schemes and schemas for consumption and use by human and machine agents, the NSDL Registry will support the machine mapping of relationships among terms and concepts in those schemes (semantic mappings) and schemas (crosswalks). Thus, the Registry will support the key NSDL goals of metadata discovery, reuse, standardization and interoperability both within NSDL and globally.

The project will use as its development base the open-source Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) Registry application. The existing DCMI application will be significantly extended through this work to support: (1) the automated creation and maintenance of schemas and application profiles by NSDL projects; and (2) the submission of schemas and schemes to a registry workflow for review and publication. All of the development work will leverage the latest knowledge and standards for networked knowledge organization systems, schema and application profile declaration, and registry development.

The NSDL Metadata Registry project has been funded by the National Science Foundation

Documentation

Our Latest paper describing the Metadata Registry:

A Metadata Registry from Vocabularies UP: The NSDL Registry Project

Presented at the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, 3 - 6 October 2006.

Functional requirements and planning documents

These documents include use cases, information on versioning strategies, and other detailed information on the registry development process.

The Registry Blog

The Registry Blog is where all registry developers are welcome to post on advances and issues.

Code Development

The Registry software is available, and will continue to be as the software grows and matures. Instructions for obtaining the latest code can be found at the above link. If you encounter a bug, or would like to make a suggestion, please create a ticket.

The NSDL Registry is available now!

Although versioning/history, subscription output, help and notifications, and data import are not yet available, NSDL projects are welcome to use the Registry to make their vocabularies available to others. As new functionality is introduced, we will notify all registered users and give instructions on how to use the new functions.

The Registry can also provide "namespace" services to help you create and manage a unique namespace for your vocabulary as well as provide a permanent, resolvable URI for your vocabulary and each of your concepts.

The NSDL Registry is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to provide essential services to the National Science Digital Library Core Infrastructure and associated projects. It was conceived as a part of a distributed registry system supporting improved interoperability for all.

The NSDL Registry is in active development. Because development began with controlled vocabulary registration, this portion is most complete—other sections will be added as ready. The vocabularies already registered focus primarily on education.

For even more information regarding the Project, see the Registry Project page.

Registry project contacts