About 6 months ago I stopped frequently blogging, as I began work on a project that was not quite ready for a wider audience, but today that period comes to a close.

Over the past year, I have been working on a new piece of open-source software – an ISO/IEC 11179 metadata registry. This originally began from my experiences working on the Meteor Metadata Registry, which gave me an in-depth understanding of the systems and governance issues around the management of metadata across large scale organisations. I believe Aristotle-MDR provides one of the closest open-source implementations of the information model of Part 6 and the registration workflows of Part 3, in an easy to use and install piece of open-source software.

In that time, Aristotle-MDR has grown to several thousand lines of code, most substantially over 5000 line of rigorously tested Python code, tested using a suit of over 500 regression tests, and rich documentation covering installation, configuration and extension. From a front-end perspective, Aristotle-MDR uses the Bootstrap, CKEditor and jQuery libraries to provide a seemless, responsive experience, the use of the [About 6 months ago I stopped frequently blogging, as I began work on a project that was not quite ready for a wider audience, but today that period comes to a close.

Over the past year, I have been working on a new piece of open-source software – an ISO/IEC 11179 metadata registry. This originally began from my experiences working on the Meteor Metadata Registry, which gave me an in-depth understanding of the systems and governance issues around the management of metadata across large scale organisations. I believe Aristotle-MDR provides one of the closest open-source implementations of the information model of Part 6 and the registration workflows of Part 3, in an easy to use and install piece of open-source software.

In that time, Aristotle-MDR has grown to several thousand lines of code, most substantially over 5000 line of rigorously tested Python code, tested using a suit of over 500 regression tests, and rich documentation covering installation, configuration and extension. From a front-end perspective, Aristotle-MDR uses the Bootstrap, CKEditor and jQuery libraries to provide a seemless, responsive experience, the use of the](http://haystacksearch.org/) search engine provides scalable and accurate search capability, while custom wizards encourage the discovery and reuse metadata at the point of content creation.

One of the guiding principles of Aristotle-MDR has been to not only model 11179 straight-forward fashion, but do so in a way that complies with the extension principles of the standard itself. To this end, while the data model of Aristotle-MDR is and will remain quite bare-bones, it provides a robust, tested framework on which extensions can be built. Already a number of such extensions are being built, including those for the management of datasets, questionnaires, and performance indicators and for the sharing of information in the Data Documentation Initiative XML Format.

In the last 12 months, I have learned a lot as a systems developer, had the opportunity to contribute to several Django-based projects and look forward to sharing Aristotle, especially at IASSIST 2015 where I aim to present Aristotle-MDR as a stable 1.0 release. In the interim, there is a demonstration server for Aristotle available, with two guest accounts and a few hundred example items for people to use, test and possibly break.