Description of a Template

CEDAR’s Metadata Template

In CEDAR, forms are created as what we call metadata templates, or just ‘templates’. The templates contain individual questions—what we call fields— and collections of those fields called ‘elements’. Elements can be included in other elements, so these are used to organize your template. All of these are stored internally in the JSON Schema format, which CEDAR lets you view at any time during template creation.

The CEDAR template serves three purposes:

• define the template questions (including their possible answers and other features),
• document the order in which the questions and elements will appear; and
• describe the template artifact: its name, provenance including creation and update times, and other characteristics. These are broadly organized in three sections of the template, which is described in more detail in the CEDAR Template Model.