Choose the entity of central interest in your model. For example, I have people, restaurants, broadcasts, publications, etc. in my recipes model, but the entity of central interest is the recipe.
Choose one of your user groups (and associated objectives).
Identify the necessary and sufficient attributes and relationships to be included in a representation of the CHOSEN ENTITY for use in an information system to meet those users' needs.
I advise putting these in a table/spreadsheet. You can use a copy (edited or not) of the list of attributes from your conceptual model.
Examine some standards that seem appropriate (in whole or in part) for your project
A growing number of standards can be found on the wiki.
Lists/directories of standards and specifications are also available on the wiki.
You might be able to find others by searching the Web for keywords relevant to your project, plus terms like "metadata," "schema," "specification."
You might not be able to find anything ready-made for your purposes, or that expresses all attributes you need to express.
If you can't find anything at all similar, ask on the listserv.
For each attribute, list:
Metadata element name
Description of element. What does the element describe? Differentiate element from other similar elements. Pragmatics information.
If applicable, the source definition of the element—may be the URI of an element you are using from another schema
Value data type. Will the element's value be a text string, a date, a number, a number in a certain format, etc.?)
Value source. Will the element's value be derived from a particular aspect of the object (Example: Transcribe the title of the recipe as it appears on the recipe.), freely filled in, or assigned from a controlled source? If assigned from controlled source, saying that is enough. The sources need not currently exist.
Cardinality. In other words, is this element required? Can it be repeated?
After completing the above tasks, you have defined a conceptual schema for encoding metadata about your entity. Try to translate your conceptual schema (or part of it) into an XML schema.
This is not the core part of this component, but an attempt to think formally about the structure of the representation you are creating is often instructive.