our modelling approach describes metadata as application profiles in a modular and hierarchical fashion from elements of established controlled terminologies
we provide a central web-UI to manage metadata schemata on our platform backed by repositories to store them as well as related validated metadata sets.
from the start we include use cases with multiple applications from different fields of engineering, physics, and material sciences for the platform to be fully integrated into the scientific workflow.
Good scientific practice requires precise and comprehensible documentation of results. Even more when researchers want to share and publish their own research data or re-use archived data from third parties. Research data management based on widely standardised metadata is therefore essential.
An appropriate metadata management should enable researchers to select the right data set for their own research from a multitude of already existing digital data sets. In accordance with the FAIR principles, metadata must be interpretable for humans and machines. In the research project “Applying Interoperable Metadata Standards (AIMS)”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), these challenges of metadata management are addressed. The interdisciplinary team, distributed across several institutions from infrastructure and science, is developing a platform that enables researchers to create and share semantic metadata schemas. These schemas are based on SHACL shapes that allow researchers to create consistent and quality controlled RDF metadata that is highly machine readable and can be integrated into semantic knowledge graphs. Through a modelling concept that relies on inheritance and modularity, a high degree of specificity can be achieved with maximum applicability and reusability of the metadata schemas. This will increase the acceptance of researchers to integrate structured metadata into their research processes, paving the way for common metadata standards as they become more widespread.
The project is designed from the outset as a cooperation between infrastructure and research. In this way, the metadata concept realised in AIMS is to be integrated directly into the processes of the researchers involved. By considering the interoperability of the resulting metadata schemas and interfaces, the generic transfer of the solutions to other research fields is explicitly pursued.
