Making metadata FAIR for climate research

Implementing the ‘I’ in the FAIR principles means applying data and metadata standards that are appropriate to the specific research domain. There are many disciplinary standards available, but what if researchers are working in a relatively new or cross-disciplinary domain and wish to share existing data, or do not have a standard to properly describe the data they are working with? In the summer of 2020, this was the problem facing two Danish research groups assisted by the Danish e-Infrastructure Cooperation (DeIC).

Danish researchers in the Wind Energy domain together with the Danish node of the European research infrastructure AnaEE (Infrastructure for Analysis and Experimentation on Ecosystems) were assisted by metadata experts from GO-FAIR, and Stanford University’s Center for Expanded Data Annotation and Retrieval (CEDAR). DeIC set out to address the metadata challenge through organising and financing a series of ‘Metadata 4 machines’ (M4M) workshops.

After several trial-runs to refine the workshop format, by early 2021 the outcomes included FAIRification roadmaps for DTU Wind Energy and AnaEE and a template for making FAIR metadata, tailored to the researchers needs.