Workshop Report – Defining a Core Metadata Framework for Cross-Domain Data Sharing and Reuse

A workshop on multi-disciplinary metadata interchange was held from 2-6 October at the internanationally renowned computer-science institute in Wadern, Germany. It was attended by 24 participants from 22 organizations in 12 countries. It focused on the development of the Cross-Domain Interoperability Framework (CDIF), being developed through the EU-funded WorldFAIR 
project. The WorldFAIR project aims to develop a set of domain neutral standards and models which are aligned to support easier exchange of metadata and data across disciplinary and infrastructural boundaries. The event was sponsored by CODATA (the Committee on Data of the International Science Council), and the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) Alliance, and subsidized by Schloss Dagstuhl. The workshop was organized by Arofan Gregory (Chair, DDI-CDI Working Group, DDI Alliance), Simon Hodson (CODATA), Hilde Orten (Sikt and DDI Alliance), Joachim Wackerow (DDI-CDI Working Group, DDI Alliance), Steve McEachern (Australian National University and DDI Alliance), and Michelle Edwards (University of Guelph).

The workshop was organized around a series of themes: 

• Modeling events, observations, and samples: this group produced a harmonized model explaining how scientific data, which is often based on measurement of events are a critical aspect of the occurrence of a measurement or sample.
• Data discovery, access, and assessment of fitness-for-purpose: this group reviewed existing work regarding data discovery and access, and how it could be extended to address evaluation and scalable provision of access to restricted data across networks of repositories.
• Data integration and metadata/semantic mapping: this group focused on the combination of data at a structural level, and the ability to equate similar semantics related to the data.
• “Universals”: this group looked at description of time, geography, units of measurement, and widely supported domain resources such as chemical classifications.

The outputs from these groups will result in direct contribu/ons to the CDIF guidelines – a deliverable of the WorldFAIR Project – and in a number of separate publications. The CDIF guidelines recommend the use of domain neutral and web-friendly standards, such as Schema.org and DCAT (for discovery and cataloguing), PROV-O (for describing provenance), SKOS, XKOS, and OWL for 
describing controlled vocabularies and ontologies, and SSSOM for describing mappings. The focus of these guidelines is on the practical implementa/on of the FAIR principles in cross-domain scenarios.

The workshop was one of a con/nuing series of workshops held at Schloss Dagstuhl, in which issues regarding data sharing and interoperability – with a focus on standard metadata – are explored. These workshops form a key component of the ISC CODATA Decadal Programme on ‘Making Data Work for Cross-Domain Grand Challenges’. Other workshops in this series were held in 2018, 2019, 2021, and 2022 at Schloss Dagstuhl.

Details regarding the event can be found on the Schloss Dagstuhl site, and on the DDI Alliance Workshop page in Confluence.