The Nansen Legacy Template Generator for Darwin Core and CF-NetCDF

The scientific community is growing increasingly aware of the importance of the FAIR data management principles for publishing scientific data. For data providers, this includes creating machine-understandable file structures such as CF-NetCDF files and Darwin Core Archives. To support scientists in creating these, we present significant upgrades to the Nansen Legacy template generator, an open-source tool for generating standardised spreadsheet templates. The new version of the template generator includes an intuitive graphical interface that encourages users to select data and metadata terms from well-established controlled vocabularies like the CF standard names, Darwin Core terms and the Attribute Convention for Data Discovery. The spreadsheet templates created include descriptions for each term and cell restrictions to prevent users from entering invalid values. While the templates generated are not inherently compliant with the FAIR principles, this paper provides suggestions for how users can transform them into FAIR-compliant data structures. The Nansen Legacy template generator helps scientists follow the FAIR data principles, facilitating transparent and reproducible sharing of scientific data. The template generator is hosted at https://www.nordatanet.no/aen/template-generator.