The National Diet Library (NDL), Japan, in conjunction with numerous other organizations, has developed the Great East Japan Earthquake Archive Project for the collection, preservation, and provision of information related to the earthquake that struck Japan on March 11, 2011. A portal site for this project was developed by the NDL and opened to the public on March 2013. The portal site enables integrated searches of many resources on the earthquake and subsequent disasters, including images, video, websites, reports, and books, that were produced by institutions, such as mass media companies, universities or academic societies.

The poster presents the Great East Japan Earthquake Archive Metadata Schema (NDLKN)[1] developed for this portal. This schema is based on the National Diet Library Dublin Core Metadata Description (DC-NDL), which is our own metadata schema, based on the DCMES and DCMI Metadata Terms.

There were two major issues to solve in the development of NDLKN. The first was coordination of metadata in various systems over multiple domains. The second was to satisfy requirements for archiving disaster records, which need to have geographic and temporal information. As a solution to the latter issue, for example, some terms were adopted from the Basic Geo (WGS84 lat/long) Vocabulary ([geo:lat] for the latitude, [geo:lond] for the longitude etc.) and Ontology for vCard ([v:region] for the prefecture, [v:locality] for the city etc.) for geospatial information and [dcterms:created] for the date the image or video was recorded. Furthermore, we described the name and URI of disasters in [dcterms:coverage].

[1] “NDLKN” is from ‘NDL Knowledge infrastructure system metadata schema’.