Issues in Crosswalking Content Metadata Standards

Margaret St. Pierre, Blue Angel Technologies, Inc., and William LaPlant, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Research Division, Technology and Human Factors Research Staff

1/01/2005
(Original Publish Date: 10/15/1998)

To reach the broadest community of information workers, metadata must be made available in accordance with a number of popular content metadata standards. As the number, size, and complexity of content metadata standards continues to grow, supplying the metadata for each standard becomes more and more repetitious, time consuming, and tedious. In order to minimize the amount of time needed to create and maintain the metadata and to maximize its usefulness to the widest community of users, there is a need for the metadata created and maintained in one standard to be accessible via related content metadata standards. For the purposes of this paper, harmonization is the process of ensuring consistency in the specification of related content metadata standards. A fully specified crosswalk provides the ability to create and maintain one set of metadata, and to map that metadata to any number of related content metadata standards. In the future, fully automated crosswalks will enable search engines to function with any given family of content metadata standards. Harmonization of a family of content metadata standards is useful in the development of crosswalks among these standards. This paper distills the key issues involved in crosswalk development and identifies those areas in which harmonization can contribute.