A facet-based open and extensible resource model for research data infrastructures

Research Data represent a valuable assets in science as well as in our society. Their management requires the development and operation of Research Data Infrastructures, i.e. complex and distributed systems specifically conceived to address the needs arising in Research Data collection, collation, processing and publishing. The development of such systems require a shared model for describing the existing "resources", namely the datasets as well as the rest of services and entities worth being considered to properly deal with the datasets. In this paper it is presented an open and extensible model based on two basic notions: Resource to describe the entities, Facet to characterize a feature of a Resource. The model enables its users to instantiate these basic concepts and define context-specific relationships among the typologies of defined resources.