The Open Metadata Registry: An update

Editor's Summary Started in 2005 as the metadata registry for the National Science Digital Library (NSDL), the NSDL Registry has undergone significant changes. It has expanded, shifted from its original support source to JES & Co. and been renamed in 2010 as the Open Metadata Registry (OMR). While serving end users seeking vocabularies available for a project or group, the OMR focuses on supporting the primary providers of vocabularies by facilitating publishing and tracking evolving versions of their vocabularies. Work is ongoing to enable the OMR to support multilingual vocabularies and separate but associated language versions. To promote consistent term labels, the use of uniform resource identifiers (URIs) is promoted as well as concept representation by numeric strings. The OMR is currently being reengineered in Drupal. As it undergoes dramatic changes, the OMR is offered as a valuable infrastructure tool for data sharing.