The ISO/IEC 11179 specification remains the gold standard in the definition of metadata registries. However, to date there have been relatively few open implementations that conform to this standard. The AIHW METEoR metadata registry has a strong reputation as a leading, standards-based public facing registry for government metadata, however it growth has pushed it further than its original scope and technological base can support. Based on the system architecture of METEoR, the Aristotle Metadata Registry is a rebuilt implementation that provides an free open-source, easy to install and scalable metadata registry.

With an enterprise level search engine to improve discoverability, a thoroughly tested permissions suite that ensure security around of the publication of information, and rich authoring environment, Aristotle-MDR aspires to be the next in new phase of metadata registry. The use of the Object-oriented principles of the Python-based Django web framework compliments the principle of extensibile metadata as described by the ISO/IEC 11179 standard.

This presentation covers the technical challenges in build an open source metadata registry, solutions and implementation methods, benefits of an open-source framework and presents the open extension API for the design of extension modules to provide additional metadata objects, including health indicators, datasets and questionnaires, as well a wide range of export formats such as PDFs, DHIS2 and Data Documentation Initiative XML format.