BY-COVID - D3.1 - Metadata standards. Documentation on metadata standards for inclusion of resources in data portal

BY-COVID Work Package 3 is focused on services for the discovery and integration of COVID-19 data by delivering a flexible, tiered metadata discovery system across different domains, metadata standards, and maturity/robustness levels of data sources. This will enable the linking of FAIR data and metadata on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, on other related viruses and diseases, and on socio-economic consequences, across research fields, from omics, clinical, and epidemiological research, to social sciences and humanities.

In a series of work package meetings and a workshop, with participation from all other work packages, we have surveyed community metadata standards used by (potential) BY-COVID-19 portal resources (4.1), defined a flexible, three-tiered approach to metadata indexing in the COVID-19 portal (section 4.2), derived common metadata attributes for record level discovery (4.3) and established a workflow with FAIRsharing for resource level metadata capture and exchange (4.4).

This work establishes the basis for the further development of the COVID-19 Portal metadata discovery and provides a path for integration of metadata from multi-domain partners in BY-COVID, as well as our ISIDORe sibling project, and relevant external resources. To ensure smooth integration of partner-provided metadata, we will run a technical workshop open to all partners, discussing workflows, metadata attributes and formats, and support tools.