COVID-19

a look through the metadata lenses

Abstract

The integration, sharing and interoperability of clinical data is one of the actions that can help countries to improve the exchange of data. In this study, the metadata and metadata standards that provide the best structured and effective information retrieval are highlighted. Thus, this article seeks to identify and study international and national initiatives that address the adoption of metadata and metadata standards in environments, systems and platforms that operate with digital content for clinical data and information. Through bibliographic research, it was possible to raise some initiatives of systems, environments and platforms that have dealt with health information, especially those related to COVID-19, in order to verify whether such cases have adopted metadata and metadata standards. Internationally, The Semantic Scholar was approached in partnership with the Allen Institute for AI; The Interoperability Standards Advisory (ISA); Institutional Repository for Information Exchange - IRIS, of the Pan American Health Organization; at the national level, two cases under development at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar). The results show that all initiatives adopt metadata and metadata standards in their actions, one at the international level uses the Dublin Core metadata standard, a consecrated format in the bibliographic universe and the other, metadata that are in line with Linked Data and Semantic Web. For the digital content created during the health contingency to be added to the collections in an interoperable and permanent way, it is necessary to adopt metadata and metadata standards, as they are the ones that guarantee data consistency and define interoperability, contributing to the exchange of data between health institutions and optimizing the retrieval of quality and reliable information.