Metadata matters: Structuring data in living materials research
Abstract
Advances in data-driven research increasingly demand high quality, annotated data for data science and machine learning approaches. This highlights the urgency for structured data in living materials research and therefore calls for a metadata schema that supports not only human readability but also machine-readable data, aligning with FAIR data principles. To address this gap, we aim to establish metadata standards for living materials research that can easily be integrated into researchers' workflows.
Full text
Introduction and Objective Standardized metadata is vital for managing and reusing research data. A major challenge lies in determining which contexual information is relevant for data description. To streamline unstructured data, we are standardizing metadata for semantically describing living materials research data. In practice, manually compiling such metadata for each dataset is often tedious, inconsistent and fragmented. To simplify this process, we plan to develop a graphical user interface (GUI) to capture metadata.and export into interoperable and machine readable formats. Metadata Matters: Structuring Data in Living Materials Research Soni Lama, Roland Bennewitz INM – Leibniz-Institute for New Materials, Campus D2 2, 66123 Saarbrücken Metadata User Interface Metadata schema with user-friendly interface will enable researchers to easily capture and export metadata in a structured way. This tool will simplify metadata capture with established standards and promote interoperability across datasets and repositories. Advantages ▪Reduce efforts to manually record unstructured and poorly-documented metadata ▪Interoperable and machine-readable formats ▪Simplify metadata capture with established standards ▪Replace Readme file for storing data description of published papers within INM General Description Author, contributor, title, project, PI, Publication, date of experiment, data type… Sample Description Biosample, organism, cell line, strain, material type, volume, processing method… Instrument Details Instrument used, specification of method, software name, version… Analysis Method Data processing method, data analysis method, software used, source code… Key Metadata Parameters Aligns with FAIR data principles Facilitates metadata upload in repository Import/Integrate into ELN Metadata JSON Schema GUI with options to download output file in JSON, TXT & CSV