A Flexible Interface to Community-Driven Metadata

Finding interesting publications and useful data, and sharing those with other
researchers, is a vital part of research that yet should not take too much time away from the research itself. Semantic Grid technologies provide useful support for resource sharing, but their tools can be difficult to master. This paper describes the development of an interface that will provide social scientists with easy access to metadata, enabling them to create, query and browse it. Users can view the metadata associated with resources by browsing the natural language descriptions that are generated from that metadata; they can create metadata by editing those descriptions; and they can search for resources by creating textual descriptions of those resources. We aim to use the same interface for all these forms of metadata access to ensure that, by mastering one tool, users can easily perform all metadata-related tasks.