B2FIND & QUALITY OF METADATA

Heinrich Widmann is a senior data manager at the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ), a national service provider for climate research. Widmann has a master in physics and has worked more than a decade in the area of earth system modelling and research data management. He is also one of the lead developers in B2FIND, the cross-community metadata portal of EUDAT.

The EUDAT metadata service B2FIND provides a comprehensive joint metadata catalogue and an open data portal within an interdisciplinary, community-driven research data infrastructure. Within the implemented metadata ingestion workflow we focus on the semantic mapping of the non-uniform, community specific metadata to homogeneous structured datasets. The presentation addresses in more detail the aspects of metadata quality in such high diverse cross-disciplinary research environments. An illustration based on the example of the facet 'Discipline' demonstrates how metadata quality can be assured and improved in practice.

Alex Ball works for the UK Digital Curation Centre, and is based in UKOLN at the University of Bath. He is co-moderator of the Dublin Core Science and Metadata Community, co-chair of the Metadata Standards Directory Working Group of the Research Data Alliance, and Metadata Co-ordinator for the Jisc Research Data Registry and Discovery Service project. He has written extensively about research data management and digital curation, particularly on matters such as metadata for research data, data citation, data licensing, curation of computer-aided design and related engineering information, and Web archiving. He is also Production Editor for the International Journal of Digital Curation.
In the UK, Jisc is developing a national research data registry and discovery service. The service will be powered by metadata harvested from long-established data centres and the newer data repositories set up by universities. A pilot version helped to identify the challenges arising from combining metadata of various levels of detail and quality, leading to a preliminary set of recommendations for discovery metadata.

Jane Greenberg is the A. B. Kroeger Professor and director of the Metadata Research Center at the College of Computing & Informatics, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA. She is also a 2014 Data Science Fellow at the National Consortium for Data Science in Chapel Hill, NC. She is the PI for the HVIE project, coPI of Dryad, co-Chair of the RDA-Metadata Standards Directory Working Group, and active in a number of data science efforts including the DataONE and DFC NSF sponsored DataNets. Her research and teaching focus in the area of metadata, knowledge organization, and ontology/semantics.

This presentation looks at metadata as an asset to advance both the practice and dialog of surrounding metadata quality. The presentation will introduce the MetaDataCAPT’L initiative, a project Metadata Research Center at Drexel University, and examine our understanding of capital in conjunction with quality. Examples will be drawn from the Dryad repository, HIVE, RDA-Metadata Standards Directory the Viral Vector Lab at the U.S. NIEHS to illustrate aspects of capital and quality in metadata workflows.

Kathleen Shearer is the Executive Director of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), an international association of repository initiatives. COAR has a membership of over 100 institutions worldwide from 36 countries in 5 continents. Its mission is to enhance the visibility and application of research outputs through a global network of open access digital repositories.

Shearer has her Masters of Library and Information Studies (MLIS) and has worked in the areas of open access and research data management for over a decade. She is co-chair of the RDA Long Tail of Research Data Interest Group, which is looking at good practices for managing multidisciplinary data sets in repositories. She is also coordinator of Project ARC, a Canadian project aimed at building a library-based network for research data management in Canada and is a member of the Steering Committee for Research Data Canada.

As noted by the Australian National Data Service, “Good quality, accurate and current metadata renders research data more useful and accessible over the longer term”(1). In the spring of 2014, the several members of the Research Data Alliance, Long-Tail of Research Data Interest Group conducted a short survey of the discovery metadata for research data repositories. The survey targeted repositories that collect so-called "long tail" of research data, broadly defined as research data that does not fall within the scope of big, homogeneous datasets. This was followed by a discussion about ways of improving discovery metadata during the previous RDA meeting in Dublin. This presentation will present the results of the survey and offer some recommended practices for improving discovery metadata in the context of long-tail research data.