DataID: towards semantically rich metadata for complex datasets

Abstract

The constantly growing amount of Linked Open Data (LOD) datasets constitutes the need for rich metadata descriptions, enabling users to discover, understand and process the available data. This metadata is often created, maintained and stored in diverse data repositories featuring disparate data models that are often unable to provide the metadata necessary to automatically process the datasets described. This paper proposes DataID, a best-practice for LOD dataset descriptions which utilize RDF files hosted together with the datasets, under the same domain. We are describing the data model, which is based on the widely used DCAT and VoID vocabularies, as well as supporting tools to create and publish DataIDs and use cases that show the benefits of providing semantically rich metadata for complex datasets. As a proof of concept, we generated a DataID for the DBpedia dataset, which we will present in the paper.