Building an International Consensus on Multi-Disciplinary Metadata Standards: A CODATA Case History in Nanotechnology

Science today is rapidly becoming both multi-disciplinary and data-driven. These two trends pose new challenges to the capture, management, sharing, and dissemination of research data. Multi-disciplinary science means diverse data generation communities and equally diverse user groups. Data-driven means that sharing data among different communities is more important than ever because of the growth of modeling and knowledge discovery. Nanotechnology is a prime example, involving chemistry, physics, materials science, toxicology, environmental science, and many other disciplines. During the past few years, CODATA has created an international, multi-disciplinary Working Group that has developed a number of critically important metadata standards to facilitate sharing nanomaterials data. In this paper, we discuss the challenges faced in starting and executing this work, as well as the approaches taken to make progress on producing internationally accepted metadata standards. Many of these approaches are directly applicable to other multi-disciplinary subjects.