New ITO Publication: Harvestable Metadata Services

ITO alumni Alicia Urquidi Díaz and Karen Payne have recently published their work on harvestable metadata services, completed in collaboration with WDS members during their time at the ITO. The paper is titled “Harvestable Metadata Services Development: Analysis of Use Cases from the World Data System”, and is available through the CODATA Data Science Journal.

Harvestable metadata services encapsulate research infrastructure protocols and services that enable their holdings to be shared with research object sharing and reuse platforms. This practise increases discoverability and findability both for their intended research community as well as for interdisciplinary audiences. This paper delved into the current practises for harvestable metadata services by select WDS members and the challenges they face in continuing to offer and build upon them

Graphical representation of harvestable metadata services. Clouds representing data repositories is harvested into a larger cloud labelled "aggregation service", where the data is crosswalked, linked, and indexed. The Aggregation Service points to a browser labelled "Discovery Portal" and from there to discovery portal users, represented by a person tapping a screen. — The metadata harvesting process. Standardized metadata is harvested from repository catalogues, then processed by an aggregation service. The service disseminates the metadata records through a search and discovery portal and/or by serving it to further aggregation services for distribution (Figure 1 from Downs et al, 2023)

Nine WDS members participated in this work, and seven engaged as use cases to identify current practices and challenges. The participating members were Centre de Données Astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS), Global Change Research Data Publishing and Repository (GCdataPR), International Real-time Magnetic Observatory Network (INTERMAGNET), International Service of Geomagnetic Indices (ISGI), International GNSS Service (IGS), National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC), Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), World Data Center for Geomagnetism (WDC Geomagnetism Edinburgh), and World Data Centre for Renewable Resources and Environment (WDC-RRE). Members who engaged as use cases were GCdataPR, IGS, INTERMAGNET, ISGI, NSSDC, SEDAC, and WDC-RRE. The current practises, at the time of writing, for harvestable metadata services for these seven are elaborated in Section 3.3 of the paper.

The challenges identified in offering and expanding harvestable metadata services spanned addressing changing user needs, securing sustainable resourcing for current and future services, balancing evolving technologies with usability, and the limitations of relying solely on harvestable metadata services as a discoverability and findability strategy. Read more in the open access article: https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2023-020

Congratulations, Karen and Alicia!