Metadata plays an increasingly important role in the life cycle of scientific information and data. Content standards for scientific metadata allow the information and data in this life cycle to be organized in consistent forms and formats to facilitate discovery and use. Creating and managing metadata needs an orchestrated effort involving professionals from computer science, library and information science, and science disciplines. When content standards for scientific metadata meet specialized or local requirements, problems may occur at different levels and force the adoption of such content standards to bend towards local requirements or vice versa. What are these problems in balancing between content standards and local requirements? How should we formulate strategies to solve the problems? What will it take to implement the strategies? This presentation attempts to address these questions from the level of science data processing, technology for data management and use, and social and policy perspectives.

The first part of the presentation will provide an overview of content standards and the relationships between these content standards. Examples of scientific metadata projects will be used to demonstrate the variations that these projects have with the standards they adopted. The second part will present the different levels of data processing and how the processing levels affect the requirements for metadata. Finally, the presentation will discuss the strategies for balancing between content standards and local requirements at data processing, technology, and social and policy levels.

Dr. Jian Qin is an Associate Professor at the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University. Her research interest areas include knowledge modeling and organization, ontologies, learning object vocabulary, metadata, Web content management, and scientific communication. She has published over 50 papers and a book, Metadata (co-authored with Marcia Lei Zeng) that was published earlier this year, and given presentations at numerous national and international conferences. Her research has been funded by National Science Foundation, OCLC Online Library Computer Center, and the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). She teaches in the areas of information organization, knowledge organization systems, Web content management, and metadata. She was a visiting scholar at OCLC in 2002 and is a member of the editorial board for two international journals. Dr. Qin holds a Ph.D. degree from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MLIS from the University of Western Ontario.