Open Metadata for Research Data Discovery in Canada

ABSTRACT

The potential for reusing research data is inextricably tied to how discoverable these data are to other researchers. Currently in Canada, cross-disciplinary discovery of research data is limited. This article discusses the processes followed and results achieved by the Portage Data Discovery Metadata Working Group in its efforts to support the development of the Federated Research Data Repository discovery service in Canada. Ideas around metadata standards, best practices for harvesting research data, developing common data models, and challenges associated with linking research data to other research outputs are explored.

KEYWORDS:

• data discovery
• metadata
• metadata crosswalk

Notes

1 A DOI https://www.doi.org/ is a persistent identifier system for digital research data. Countries and member organizations become members of DataCite to issue and register DOIs for datasets.

2 http://www.openrepositories.org/; e.g., Samvera, Islandora, Dataverse, EPrints, DSpace

3 ResourceSync (http://www.openarchives.org/rs/toc) has been positioned as the de facto successor to OAI for several years but has not been as widely adopted as of this writing. (NISO, 2017).

4 http://sickle.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ (Loesch, 2015).

5 FRDR's search index has not been decoupled from Globus' bespoke ElasticSearch deployment, though it could be; the benefits of using JSON-LD as a transitional format for providing linked data are expanded upon in the Linked Data Initiatives section of this article.

6 http://www.dfg.de/download/pdf/dfg_im_profil/gremien/fachkollegien/amtsperiode_2016_2019/fachsystematik_2016-2019_en_grafik.pdf (DFG, 2017).

7 DataCite 4.0 Schema https://schema.datacite.org/meta/kernel-4.0/ defines the resource type element as mandatory and adds new elements for referencing funder and award information (Datacite, 2017).

8 FAIRSharing https://fairsharing.org/ (FAIRSharing, 2018).

9 ORCID https://orcid.org/ (ORCID, “What is ORCID”).

10 Scholexplorer/DLI Service https://dliservice.research-infrastructures.eu/index.html#/ (OpenAIRE, “Scholexplorer”).

11 TritonSHARE dashboard prototype https://cos-labs.github.io/share-analytics/#/ucsd (COS, 2018).