Interoperability and Distributed Collaboration in InvenioRDM

CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) has collaborated for the past 2 years with a widely distributed international community on the development of InvenioRDM, an extensible turn-key repository solution. Differing metadata standards utilized for description and access across the globe have led to fertile discussions among team regarding the base data model to employ and field-specific controlled vocabularies. As discussions evinced the need to consider increasing stakeholder needs and requirements, it became clear that a dedicated group was needed to support systematic recording and discussion of partner requirements in order to reach decisions on the data model that could have a positive impact on all adopters. A metadata interest group was formed, with membership open to all project stakeholders, and regular meetings set to discuss user needs, field-by-field. Discussions in this group have helped to reduce the boundaries between distributed stakeholders and bolster the repository community as a whole through a joint, democratic effort open to all, including technical and non-technical participants.