AquaDiva Metadata: Towards Achieving FAIRness in the AquaDiva Data Portal

The Collaborative Research Centre AquaDiva is a large collaborative project spanning a variety of domains, such as biology, geology, chemistry, and computer science, with the common goal of better understand the Earth’s critical zone, in particular, how environmental conditions and surface properties shape the structure, properties, and functions of the subsurface. Within AquaDiva, large volumes of heterogeneous observational data are being collected. Besides this structured data, knowledge is also encoded in an unstructured form in scientific publications. To support search and dataset discovery, standard metadata is recommended to describe data. However, due to the heterogeneity in AquaDiva datasets, one metadata standard does not fit all. In the first phase, we made use of EML and ABCD. However, both of them are not adequate for AquaDiva. Therefore, we develop and introduce AquaDiva specific metadata to effectively describe AquaDiva data and support dataset search and discovery. In particular, the proposed metadata consists of four main components: a general component to provide information about the dataset, such as title, description and a set of main keywords; the second component to introduce information about the project(s) involved in collecting and generating the dataset; the third component to describe information about persons, such as dataset owner, dataset curators; the last and the most important component to present AquaDiva-specific metadata information, such as sampling location, sample object, sample type and the data types generated from these samples. As a next step, we plan to link our metadata concepts (or to annotate our metadata concepts with them) to appropriate controlled vocabularies and ontologies. This not only contributes to interoperability but also ensures a well-understood, common definition of the fields.