In 2005, a team based at Cornell and the University of Washington was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to build a Metadata Registry for the NSDL. Although most registry projects at that time had begun by registering metadata schemas, the NSDL Registry group, inspired by the emerging W3C Simple Knowledge Organisation Standard (SKOS), decided to begin by registering controlled vocabularies.

Jon Phipps and Diane Hillmann will demonstrate the current development version of the NSDL Registry, and discuss issues around service provision for vocabulary users and owners, as well as versioning. Future plans for metadata schema and application profile registration will be outlined. They will also briefly introduce their work re-implementing the metadata repository originally developed for NSDL as an open source, generalized metadata management layer for the Gateway for 21st Century Skills (GEM).

The presenters suggest that interested participants take a look at their paper, "A Metadata Registry from Vocabularies Up: The NSDL Registry Project".