MetaData made easy!
Rainer M. Krug1 & Owen L. Petchey1
1 Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
Abstract
With an increasing call for FAIR data, metadata, and it’s quality, plays an ever increasing role. Nevertheless, providing metadata is not easily accomplished. One of the reasons for this is the cumbersome way of entering metadata in formats or webforms needed by repositories. Also, there is little or no quality control. Finally, the metadata schemes used by the repositories are either restricted to bibliometric metadata (e.g. DataCite) or are using metadata schemes which have to cover a vast diversity of different data (e.g. EML or Darwin Core).
I will present an approach which uses domain specific metadata schemes to overcome these problems, by developing these schemes together with scientists of their domain. It can be employed without detailed technical knowledge, e.g. using spreadsheets and a web browser. This will help researchers recognise the value of metadata for their own research and sharing. The provided validation tool increases quality of metadata.