Use of metadata registries for searching for statistical data

The Internet has spawned an insatiable appetite for information. This appetite cannot be satisfied without useful search tools. These tools rely on metadata in order to give targeted and meaningful results to searches, and the Internet world is realising that metadata, its management, and the means to search these metadata, are an integral part of the Internet world. The EC 5th Framework project COSMOS aims to demonstrate the use of metadata in this way by building a common model for describing a statistical data set in terms of metadata, populating a metadata registry with descriptions consistent with the model, and searching the registry to find the data sets, and finally to access the data sets in the relevant repository.