The SSHOC Reference Ontology (SSHOCro) proposes an ontological model and RDF Schema to be used as a top-level ontology for organizing knowledge and information found distributed across various primary sources of information in the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC). It aims at providing a semantic interoperability framework for the description of the SSHOC data life cycle. SSHOCro will have the function of providing a conceptual model that can be used in order to (re)describe, at a generic level, the real-world life-cycle of creating, using and finding data –amongst other actions –as it actually takes place in the various domains of social sciences and humanities. The practical use of such a conceptual model to the research community is twofold. It can be applied as a standard to devise and implement metadata capture schemes for tracking the data life-cycle in individual projects/institutions/disciplines. Furthermore, encoded in a semantic data format (e.g. RDF), it can be of use for mapping, transforming and integrating existing data across projects/institutions/disciplines into interoperable pools of information for re- use and further exploitation. Information integration and harmonization is to be tested by mapping selected metadata from (at least) two indicative SSH metadata standards to the common SSHOCro schema. In what follows, there will be explicit reference to the process of selecting said metadata standards & samples to be mapped to SSHOCro.