Pragmatic MDR: a metadata repository with bottom-up standardization of medical metadata through reuse.

We demonstrated the feasibility of the pragmatic metadata repository concept for medical documentation. Applications of the prototype in two use cases suggest that it facilitates the reuse of data elements. Our evaluation showed that bottom-up standardization based on a large collection of real-world metadata can yield useful results. The proposed concept shall not replace existing top-down approaches, rather it complements them by showing what is commonly used in the community to guide other researchers.