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Metadata

Beyond the structure of a model, the OntoUML Schema captures rich, standards-aligned metadata — the descriptive, provenance, rights, and classification information that turns a serialized ontology into a well-documented, shareable artifact. This chapter aggregates, in one place, every metadata property the schema records and — just as importantly — explains how to use them. Where each property is formally defined elsewhere, this chapter links back to that definition rather than restating it.

The schema captures metadata at two levels:

  • Element metadata is carried by every element (identity such as id, created, and modified) and by every named element — projects, diagrams, and model elements — which additionally carry descriptive information such as name, description, creators, and contributors.
  • Project metadata is carried by the Project container. It documents the ontology as a whole: attribution and provenance, rights and access, classification against controlled vocabularies, and identification and indexing.

FAIR by design​

The metadata layer is not decorative — it is the mechanism by which the schema makes OntoUML models FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. Each FAIR principle maps onto concrete features of the schema.

  • Findable. Every element carries rich descriptive metadata — name, keywords, description — that makes it discoverable by humans and search tools. More fundamentally, every element has a globally unique, persistent identifier: appending an element's id to the project's namespace (a resolvable base URI) yields a stable URI that identifies the element on the web — a FAIR Digital Object.
  • Accessible. Because identifiers are resolvable URIs, elements are retrievable by their identifier over standard web protocols. At the project level, landingPages say where a project can be obtained and accessRights describe who may access it and how.
  • Interoperable. Every serialization shares a single, standard shape defined by one JSON Schema. Metadata values are drawn from controlled vocabularies — the OntoUML/UFO Catalog Metadata Vocabulary (OCMV) and IANA language tags — and external references use the resource type (a name plus a URI), linking a model into the wider semantic web.
  • Reusable. A clear license, explicit provenance (creators, contributors, publisher, sources), and rich usage context (contexts, ontologyTypes, designedForTasks) tell a potential reuser exactly what a model is, where it came from, and under what terms it may be reused.
FAIR by design

The OntoUML Schema is FAIR by design. Findability and accessibility come from resolvable, namespace-based identifiers; interoperability from a single standard shape plus controlled vocabularies; and reusability from explicit licensing and provenance. Populating the metadata described in this chapter is what activates these guarantees for a given model — the more complete the metadata, the more FAIR the model.