"Evaluating and Refining Cross-Domain Metadata Exchange Frameworks" - Dagstuhl Workshop, October 13-18, 2024: Summary Report

The DDI Alliance and CODATA sponsored a workshop titled “Evaluating and Refining Cross-Domain Metadata Exchange Frameworks” held at Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics in Wadern, Germany from October 13 to October 18, 2024. The main focus of the workshop was on the Cross-Domain Interoperability Framework (CDIF), an output of the recently completed WorldFAIR project. CDIF is a set of guidelines for the coordinated use of standards for describing FAIR resources with a core set of metadata. Development of the guidelines is ongoing, under the next round of WorldFAIR projects. The workshop was intended to further explore and develop these ideas, for incorporation into CDIF and related efforts.

The event was attended by 24 experts, including participants in the WorldFAIR project and the CDIF Advisory and Working Groups, members of related FAIR initiatives in EOSC, FAIR Impact, and RDA, and potential users from various domains, including hard and social sciences, and representatives of the official statistics community, including the UN Environment Programme and UN groups working on oceans data. The work was organized around topical subgroups, which are described below. The range of outputs was broad, from specific issues with the current set of CDIF recommendations through future directions around data provenance and quality through more exploratory discussions of data context. Overall, the event was a major success – each of the groups was able to meet their goals in terms of substantive outputs, and plans for further work have been established.

Further information can be found at the workshop wiki.