Proposal of a metadata application profile for technical reports

Abstract

Technical reports may be elaborated to serve multiple objectives and they constitute important sources of information for researchers and organizations. However their discovery and retrieval may be compromised due to particular characteristics related to the way they are described. A metadata application profile is recognized for providing increased interoperability and semantics between information systems, favouring discovery. In this article we report on the process of developing an application profile for technical reports and present the respective profile. This application profile includes elements from metadata vocabularies already consolidated in the context of scholarly publication and also elements from a specific metadata vocabulary developed within the scope of this work, techrap. The final product of this study are the constraints matrices with 7 classes and 89 properties. The results of this work are useful for metadata librarians and managers of online digital respositories.