ISO 21526 Conform Metadata Editor for FAIR Unicode SKOS Thesauri

Abstract

Metadata repositories are an indispensable component of data integration infrastructures and support semantic interoperability between knowledge organization systems. Standards for metadata representation like the ISO/IEC 11179 as well as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) by the World Wide Web Consortium were published to ensure metadata interoperability, maintainability and sustainability. The FAIR guidelines were composed to explicate those aspects in four principles divided in fifteen sub-principles. The ISO/IEC 21526 standard extends the 11179 standard for the domain of health care and mandates that SKOS be used for certain scenarios. In medical informatics, the composition of health care SKOS classification schemes is often managed by documentalists and data scientists. They use editors, which support them in producing comprehensive and valid metadata. Current metadata editors either do not properly support the SKOS resource annotations, require server applications or make use of additional databases for metadata storage. These characteristics are contrary to the application independency and versatility of raw Unicode SKOS files, e.g. the custom text arrangement, extensibility or copy & paste editing. We provide an application that adds navigation, auto completion and validity check capabilities on top of a regular Unicode text editor.

Keywords: Metadata; classification; data management; data visualization; health information interoperability; semantic web.