Results of the 1st Interdisciplinary NFDI Metadata Workshop, January 2025 : Can we agree on cross-disciplinary metadata standards to improve the reuse of research data?

The German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) unites activities across all scientific disciplines to realise an overarching research data management. The interdisciplinary discussion and agreement on common standards for the description of research data, be it through metadata or terminology, is a key element for the successful implementation of FAIR data. The Task Force Metadata of the NFDI section “(Meta)data, Terminologies, Provenance” aims to moderate and coordinate the process of identifying and evaluating existing cross-disciplinary terminologies and metadata schemas as suitable candidates for NFDI-agreed recommendations. The Task Force takes its motivation from the NFDI goals and the strategy of 2025/26 to develop cross-disciplinary metadata standards for the comprehensive (re-)usability of research data.

With this vision in mind, the Task Force organised a two-day interactive NFDI Metadata Workshop at the Open Science Lab of TU Dresden to identify and evaluate suitable existing generic metadata schemas and recommendations on how to apply these in the disciplines represented by the NFDI. Altogether 46 participants from 26 NFDI consortia discussed common metadata schemas, disciplinary needs, and standardization approaches. Key sessions included expert talks from NFDI, re3data and EOSC, an overview of institutional processes for metadata standardization. In a preliminary landscape analysis the Task Force had identified DCAT, DataCite, and schema.org as three established and commonly applied metadata schemas to be discussed as potential candidates for NFDI-wide recommendations from the perspectives of the 26 NFDI communities. A World Café session facilitated discussions across disciplines about the utilization of the aforementioned metadata schema, , and the adoption of re3data for repository registration. The workshop also addressed questions about how repositories related to the NFDI can be represented in re3data in the future, including recommendation for registration and updating metadata of such repositories.

In this presentation we will summarise the results of the workshop and give an outlook on how this dialogue can be continued towards an NFDI recommendation on a portfolio of cross-disciplinary metadata standards for research data.