Facilitating Metadata Interoperability in CLARIN-DK

The issue for CLARIN archives at the metadata level is to facilitate the user's possibility to describe their data, even with their own standard, and at the same time make these metadata meaningful for a variety of users with a variety of resource types, and ensure that the metadata are useful for search across all resources both at the national and at the European level. We see that different people from different research communities fill in the metadata in different ways even though the metadata was defined and documented. This has impacted when the metadata are harvested and displayed in different environments. A loss of information is at stake. In this paper we view the challenges of ensuring metadata interoperability through examples of propagation of metadata values from the CLARIN-DK archive to the VLO. We see that the CLARIN Community in many ways support interoperability, but argue that agreeing upon standards, making clear definitions of the semantics of the metadata and their content is inevitable for the interoperability to work successfully. The key points are clear and freely available definitions, accessible documentation and easily usable facilities and guidelines for the metadata creators.