Crowdsourcing Metadata - Challenges and Outlook

Recent years have shown the power of user-sourced information evidenced by the success of Wikipedia and its many emulators. Agencies on the other hand publish metadata on their data products, but have little opportunity to get structured feedback on that metadata (codebooks) from their users. Creating and augmenting metadata is a labour-intensive endeavor. Harnessing collective knowledge from actual data users can supplement officially generated metadata. As part of our Comprehensive Extensible Data Documentation and Access Repository (CED2AR) infrastructure, we demonstrate a prototype of crowdsourced metadata (codebooks), using DDI-C and supplemental XML.