Using Dublin Core Standard for the Metadata Description of Transport Statistics - Practical Experience from a Project Dedicated to the Set-Up of an Interlinked Statistics Portal

The analysis of data on transport developments is one major objective in the transport research focus of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Following this objective, the DLR’s Institute for Transport Research (VF) offers, together with the Clearing House of Transport and Mobility, a unique collection of publicly funded travel and mobility surveys for Germany and is the official provider for German household surveys and statistics. Additionally, information about similar statistical data sets and data portals in Europe is made available. With the “MONITOR” portal, the Institute of Air Transport and Airport Research (FW), as the second DLR institute in the aforementioned field, provides detailed information and statistics concerning air transport developments. Furthermore, with a set of indicators the institute performs analyses of the global long-term air transport development regarding air traffic and financial performance besides sustainability issues. As both institutes use the Dublin Core Standard for the description of the data sources in use, in 2011 the idea came up of realising a common (meta-) data repository for interested users who have the need to combine and investigate different transport statistics. Accordingly, the project “STRADA@DLR” (Search TRAnsport DAta @ DLR) was launched in cooperation with DLR’s Facility on Simulations and Software Technology (SC) to create an external search and analysis system allowing directed access to the mentioned data repositories. In this context, the presented project report discusses the usage of Dublin Core Standard in both institutes, as well as the organisational challenges and the technical approach in order to elaborate a harmonised metadata scheme for the implementation of the STRADA@DLR portal.