AIMS provides infrastructure for a metadata management
The central component of AIMS is a web platform that provides intuitive tools for creating, publishing, further developing and re-using metadata schemas as application profiles. It is based on the our modelling approach and enables the documentation of research data by publishing metadata records that conform to the schemas managed by the platform. Three major elements make up the core of this infrstructure: a UI with generator, an application profile repository and a metadata repository.
For the creation of application profiles and metadata, we chose uniform format which can act interoperably and is already widely supported: the Resource Description Framework (RDF). As an already established standard for ontologies, is used to formulate application profiles and metadata. To represent application profiles we apply the Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL), a standard for describing application profiles in RDF. It offers the possibility of specifying the desired structure of a metadata record with recourse to terms from controlled vocabularies according to our modular principle.
UI with Generator
The creation of application profiles by selecting appropriate terms from controlled vocabularies is made intuitive for the user by a graphical interface that allows searching for terms and merging them by drag and drop, without requiring an engagement with the exact syntax of RDF and SHACL.
Application Profile Repository
All application profiles created or modified on the AIMS platform are stored in an designated repository to make them available for re-use. With each application profile subsequent searches deliver better and more specific results faciliating a wide use throughout the research field.
Metadata Repository
We also provides a metadata repository in which metadata records validated by means of application profiles can be stored. That allows the documentation of research data with validated metadata indepentendly of the availability of the data itself. This repository for compliant metadata records is publicly accessible and searchable.