Facilitating metadata needs for multiple research domains

Different research domains have different needs. When talking to researchers and designing applications for them to use, you very soon realize you need to adapt your vocabulary to the domain the researchers belong to.

During spring 2019 SND launched five research domain specific metadata profiles (social science, earth and environment, language, medicine and health, and archaeology and history), to be used in our systems, as well as a common profile to be used for any research domain. Consideration was taken in regards to domain specific metadata standards, infrastructure needs from e.g. CESSDA and CLARIN, controlled vocabularies and ontologies, community specific metadata, data type specific metadata, as well as needs of community specific definition of metadata fields.

The profiles also include mapping between metadata standards used by the various research domains. For the Social Science domain DDI and the CESSDA CMM are used, while for others other metadata standards are better suited. Most fields in the common metadata profile are also present in the DDI-L standard.

This paper presents experiences from the project and the results of the metadata adaptations as well as explains the process getting to the end result. We will also present the draw-backs and delimitations done to be able to reach a compromise that worked for all research domains.