Brian Caruso, Brian Lowe, and Gail Steinhart will present on the DataStaR project, which is building a Data Staging Repository to help scientists describe their research data and publish to discipline-based or institutional repositories. The team will explain the purpose and function of the staging repository, with emphasis on the metadata editor and infrastructure. DataStaR stores metadata using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) while producing schema-compliant XML metadata files for deposition in today's repositories. The goal is to build a system that anticipates widespread adoption of Semantic Web technologies while remaining compatible with existing science metadata initiatives.