Crosswalks: Transform your metadata

ARDC works with numerous partners and service providers that have a role in the capture, management and harvesting of metadata. Through these engagements, ARDC staff are exposed to numerous workflows, business requirements and procedures, including those specifically related to metadata. Issues raised through these engagements include metadata standards, profiles, harvesting and crosswalks.

Developing a metadata crosswalk is a resource intensive process requiring sound knowledge of both the source and destination schema. A crosswalk maps the elements (or fields) in one schema, to the equivalent elements in another schema.

Since ANDS' inception back in the days, our staff and partners have developed numerous crosswalks - most commonly from discipline or platform specific schema such as ISO 19115 and CKAN to RIF-CS, the schema that underpins the Research Data Australia (RDA) Registry and Research Data Australia.

Scope

This information covers selected crosswalks developed by ARDC staff or through ARDC funding. It should be noted that each crosswalk was developed to support a particular use case and is provided "as is". The purpose of sharing them is to enable others to either adopt or adapt an existing crosswalk rather than start from scratch.

ARDC staff are able to provide further information about the crosswalks listed here and may be able to assist with adapting them to meet new use cases. It's worth noting too, that the list is representative rather than comprehensive.

For example, several profiles of a particular crosswalk may have been developed to support the different business requirements of specific organisations. The list will also evolve over time as more crosswalks are developed and published.

We encourage you to ask us about other crosswalks you may be interested in, and to also let us know if you have a crosswalk you are willing to share.

Table 1: crosswalks to RIF-CS

Harvest configuration

In most cases, the crosswalks listed above were developed to enable a harvest to be configured to ingest non-RIF-CS records into the RDA Registry. The RDA Registry software is capable of:

• harvesting XML of any schema (provider type); transforming harvested XML that is not RIF-CS, to RIF-CS, by applying and XSLT (configured per data source)
• harvesting via a selection of harvest methods including HTTP GET, OAI-PMH, OGC CSW and CKAN API.

Find out more about Data Source harvest configuration and XSLTs in the RDA Registry.

Related resources

Human readable mapping from ISO 19115  (ANZLIC, MCP) Topic Categories to ANZSRC FOR Codes. Provided by Geoscience Australia. Download the ANZLIC to ANZSRC mapping (XLSX) file.

Human-readable mapping document between DataCite, RIF-CS, ANZLIC and Dublin Core.

RDA Content Providers Guide

The RDA Content Providers Guide (CPG) is a reference guide for data source administrators, repository developers, librarians and technical staff who need to understand the semantic content of RIF-CS schema documents for mapping or planning purposes. It describes the meaning and purpose of the information collected by the RDA Registry and how to use the RIF-CS schema to share that information via RDA.

More RIF-CS crosswalks

ARDC is not the only organisation that has undertaken mappings from various schema to RIF-CS. In March 2014, JISC completed a project to prepare human readable mappings to RIF-CS (v0.1.5) from:

• DDI, as used by the UK Data Archive
• profile of ISO 19115 used by the NERC Data Catalogue Service
• DataCite metadata schema
• ePrints ReCollect metadata profile
• OAI-PMH Dublin Core metadata profile

Read more about the  JISC project