The Minimum Mandatory Metadata Sets for the KIM Project and RAIDmap

A Minimum Mandatory Metadata Set (M3S) was devised for the KIM (Knowledge and Information Management Through Life) Project to address two challenges. The first was to ensure the project's documents were sufficiently self-documented to allow them to be preserved in the long term. The second was to trial the M3S and supporting templates and tools as a possible approach that might be used by the aerospace, defence and construction industries. A different M3S was devised along similar principles by a later project called REDm-MED (Research Data Management for Mechanical Engineering Departments). The aim this time was to help specify a tool for documenting research data records and the associations between them, in support of both preservation and discovery. In both cases the emphasis was on collecting a minimal set of metadata at the time of object creation, on the understanding that later processes would be able to expand the set into a full metadata record.