Detailed description of the service 

The Metadata Profile Service supports researchers or data management staff in the creation of interoperable metadata schemas as RDF-compliant application profiles. The platform also allows sharing of profiles and storing and searching metadata.

To facilitate the modelling process and make it accessible to users with only limited knowledge about ontologies, the web service provides a graphical user interface for creating metadata profiles. It allows searching for suitable terms from existing terminologies and adding them to a profile along with restrictions on the permitted values, allowing setting expected datatypes, classes, or nodetypes as well as the cardinality of attributes.

The profiles are first created as a draft that can be edited collaboratively by sharing a link, but that are otherwise not publicly visible. Once a profile is published, it can no longer be edited, but is visible to everyone and receives a persistent ID. Visible profiles can be searched and are indexed according to a metadata schema providing information like, e.g., title, description, author, creation date, as well as the scientific domain. Existing profiles can be used to derive new profiles, typically by creating more specific child profiles.

By using a hierarchical inheritance approach, which is combined with a strategy that uses the combination of relatively simple modular profiles to model complex setups, the individual profiles are highly reusable and can be used in different contexts, increasing the interoperability of both the profiles and the resulting data.