MDR: an ontology vocabulary and registry service for dataset catalogs

The web has establshed itself as a worldwide data hub facilitating the publication and unification of data. Nonetheless, machines still seem not ready to exploit this data for independently executing complex tasks. In pursuit of fulfilling the unachieved promise of the Semantic Web to facilitate machine functionality, we have focused on one particular aspect: ensuring a comprehensive experience in any consuming application. To this end, we have investigated how the appropriate reuse and exploitation of metadata can realize this vision. We have thus defined a metadata model combining an interpretation of existing metadata vocabularies with a new lightweight ontology concerned with dataset accessibility. Then, we have developed a metadata registry and a set of associated services that complement the proposed model in satisfying our elicited requirements. As tangible evidence of our solution's effectiveness and influence, we describe and examine the implementation of the metadata registry in three distinct, open-source applications.