Integrated metadata-systems within statistical offices

This paper is based on the experiences of developing the Bridge system as an integrated metadata management system for statistical offices. Investigating metadata systems in different European statistical offices it turned out that metadata is required from within several processes and for quite different purposes. In many cases metadata is purpose related, i.e. metadata is located in different places and quite often in a redundant way. Moreover, problems arise in handling different versions of metadata and providing metadata for different languages. Bridge has been developed as an integrated metadata system (IMS) to overcome such problems as redundancy, different user interfaces and others caused by heterogeneous metadata environments. How an IMS like Bridge is able to integrate distributed metadata systems and the possibilities to solve problems of different versions for metadata as well as multilingual support for document objects is shown in this paper.