A Metadata Element Set for Project Documentation

Abstract

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is a large engineering enterprise with many projects. We describe our eflorts to develop standard metadata sets across project documentation which we term the "Goddard Core ". We also address broader issues for project management metadata.

Knowledge organization trends in library and information studies: a preliminary comparison of the pre- and post-web eras

“…However, after the development of the web, the use of the term interoperability became pervasive in the reviewed literature (see concluding remarks for discussion of interoperability issues that prevailed in pre-web era, but were not analyzed in this particular project). Increasingly, organizations wanted to share their digital resources with other organizations [35]; this, however, required the development of metadata standards, schemas, and crosswalks [26,[36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43]. METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard), Dublin Core, and XML protocols were all considered particularly important to facilitating the sharing of information across repositories (see [36,38,44] for more details).…”

“…METS works as a digital archiving tool which enables the movement of digital objects between digital repositories, but also across the web [36]. Dublin Core was considered important to the interoperability movement because it essentially created a common metadata structure for describing a document -hence enabling this common metadata structure to be shared amongst repositories or digital libraries [38]. Finally, XML protocols are considered essential to facilitating metasearches across repositories [44].…”

Metadata Formats for Data Sharing in Science Support Systems

“…The simple Dublin Core element values are not limited in any way unlike to the Qualified Dublin Core, where the limitations for element values are specified using qualified terms and qualifiers. Input formats are based on generally accepted standards (Hodge et al, 2005).…”

Harnessing NASA Goddard’s Grey Literature: The Power of a Repository Framework

“…The NASA Taxonomy was developed through a NASA Headquarters contract to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), another NASA center located in California, in an effort to provide a strategic search mechanism across the NASA centers, thereby building a knowledge base to assist in browsing and navigation through large collections of disparate information objects [4]. The EOS Taxonomy was developed at NASA GSFC to help support and serve the EOS Program Office for classifying information on a Web-portal [5]. In our efforts to increase the search precision over the years, while working with specific projects to gain access to important documents which no one could find, we developed project specific controlled vocabularies to bring those once grey documents to life.…”

“…During these missions, NASA GSFC produces a tremendous amount of information. Some of these missions have project libraries that keep track of the information that pertains to the unique engineering and project management tasks involved in designing, implementing, launching, and maintaining the spacecraft [5]. There are some missions that don't have project libraries and the information is scattered about in various hands of the scientists, engineers, and project managers involved in the missions with little or no likelihood of being available for further use.…”