Metadata management: increase efficiency with Opendatasoft’s customized templates

When it comes to data sharing, strong, consistent and informative metadata is as valuable as the actual data itself. It ensures that information can be easily and confidently found, understood and reused by users.

Managing the metadata of all your data assets is critical to data sharing and democratization. That’s why Opendatasoft is committed to making metadata management as simple and efficient as possible for users of its solution.

Learn more about the metadata templates available on our data portal solution and how they help to improve data quality and compliance, increase efficiency and save time on a daily basis.

Metadata templates are forms that group together a set of fields used to describe datasets. They have been designed to facilitate metadata administration and encourage data discovery on your portal.

Users can create and activate their own customized data templates, or choose from pre-existing templates based on leading international standards.

This unique functionality benefits users in multiple ways, including:

• Improving data discoverability and searchability
• Guaranteeing effective data governance through internal, regulatory or sector-specific compliance levels for each dataset
• Optimizing administration and management by making it easier to enter metadata
• Making data integration and interoperability easier, as well as enabling metadata collection by other data ecosystems.

There are three categories of metadata templates:

• Basic templates: these include standard templates that can be common to several datasets, and fully customizable templates that can be used to create metadata tailored to an organization’s requirements.
• Interoperability templates: users can choose from a variety of pre-existing templates to ensure compatibility with different international standards, such as DCAT, DCAT-AP, INSPIRE, or Dublin Core. An in-built metadata inheritance feature significantly reduces workloads by eliminating the need to repeatedly enter the same metadata, whether in the standard model or in interoperability models such as DCAT-AP or Dublin Core.

• Administrative templates: these are visible only to portal administrators, and ensure good internal governance of metadata.

Opendatasoft’s metadata templates are built on intuitive interfaces and comprehensive support. This makes the user experience simple and seamless, encouraging rapid adoption and ensuring that metadata is filled in correctly and systematically. Clear instructions are provided to simplify the data entry process, with help texts for each field.

With Opendatasoft’s basic metadata templates, users can fine-tune fields to their organization’s precise requirements.

This offers maximum flexibility and customization, enabling customers to create templates that meet their exact specifications, including around naming conventions and fields.

Opendatasoft’s metadata templates encourage the accurate, complete entry of information, thanks to an intuitive auto-fill feature with tailored suggestions. Portal administrators save time by empowering data producers to add their own metadata while minimizing the risk of errors.

Portal administrators can make adding certain metadata compulsory. This ensures robust metadata governance and saves time by avoiding missing fields in metadata for specific assets.

Metadata is essential to your data management strategy, and Opendatasoft is constantly developing innovative new features to help you manage it effectively.

Request a demo of the solution with one of our experts to find out more