The health care and life sciences community profile for dataset descriptions

• Published in: PeerJ (San Francisco, CA) Vol. 4; p. e2331
• Main Authors: Dumontier, Michel, Gray, Alasdair J G, Marshall, M Scott, Alexiev, Vladimir, Ansell, Peter, Bader, Gary, Baran, Joachim, Bolleman, Jerven T, Callahan, Alison, Cruz-Toledo, José, Gaudet, Pascale, Gombocz, Erich A, Gonzalez-Beltran, Alejandra N, Groth, Paul, Haendel, Melissa, Ito, Maori, Jupp, Simon, Juty, Nick, Katayama, Toshiaki, Kobayashi, Norio, Krishnaswami, Kalpana, Laibe, Camille, Le Novère, Nicolas, Lin, Simon, Malone, James, Miller, Michael, Mungall, Christopher J, Rietveld, Laurens, Wimalaratne, Sarala M, Yamaguchi, Atsuko
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States PeerJ. Ltd 16.08.2016; PeerJ, Inc; PeerJ Inc
• Subjects: Bioinformatics; Biology; Computational Science; Data profiling; Dataset descriptions; Datasets; Epidemiology; FAIR data; Health informatics; Indexing (Content analysis); Life sciences; Metadata; Ontology; Provenance; Resource Description Framework-RDF; Science & Technology - Other Topics; Semantic web; Semantics; Taxonomy; Metadata; Dataset descriptions; Provenance; Data profiling; FAIR data
• ISSN: 2167-8359; 2167-8359
• DOI: 10.7717/peerj.2331

Access to consistent, high-quality metadata is critical to finding, understanding, and reusing scientific data. However, while there are many relevant vocabularies for the annotation of a dataset, none sufficiently captures all the necessary metadata. This prevents uniform indexing and querying of dataset repositories. Towards providing a practical guide for producing a high quality description of biomedical datasets, the W3C Semantic Web for Health Care and the Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG) identified Resource Description Framework (RDF) vocabularies that could be used to specify common metadata elements and their value sets. The resulting guideline covers elements of description, identification, attribution, versioning, provenance, and content summarization. This guideline reuses existing vocabularies, and is intended to meet key functional requirements including indexing, discovery, exchange, query, and retrieval of datasets, thereby enabling the publication of FAIR data. The resulting metadata profile is generic and could be used by other domains with an interest in providing machine readable descriptions of versioned datasets.