Fundamentals of scientific metadata: why context mattersOnline Event

18 Jun 2024, 09:30 → 19 Jun 2024, 13:30 Europe/Berlin

Zoom

Silke Gerlich (HMC), Özlem Özkan (HMC)

This course is an entry-level introduction to the fundamentals of scientific metadata for PhD students, early-career researchers, and postdocs. In this course we will look at the intricate relationship between (digital) research data, metadata, and knowledge; discuss why metadata is critical in today’s research; and explain some of the technologies and concepts related to structured machine-readable metadata.

Have you ever struggled to make sense of scientific data provided by a collaborator? Or, even worse, to understand your own data five months after publication... Do you have difficulties in meeting the data description requirements of your funding agency? Do you want your data to have lasting value; but don’t know how to ensure that?

Precise and structured descriptions of research data are key for scientific exchange and progress - and for ensuring recognition of your effort in data collection. The solution: make your data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable - by describing them with metadata.

This course is targeted especially at scientific staff and researchers in the Helmholtz Research Field Matter but is open to anyone who would like to better understand research data annotation with metadata.

You will learn:

• about the differences between, and the importance of data & metadata
• how to annotate your research data with structured metadata
• how to find and evaluate a suitable metadata framework and data repository
• how to use basic Markdown / JSON / XML
• which tools are already available to level up your metadata annotation game
• why structured metadata is important and how it can increase your scientific visibility

In this course, we will specifically focus on matter-related datasets, formats, and metadata schemas. However, it is open to anyone interested in learning about structured metadata and its importance in scientific research.

Tuesday 18 June

09:30 → 10:05 Welcome & Introduction

10:05 → 11:10 Data & Metadata

11:10 → 11:25 Break

11:25 → 12:30 Structure & Schema (Part 1)

12:30 → 12:45 Break

12:45 → 13:10 Structure & Schema: PART 2

13:10 → 13:30 Wrap up

Wednesday 19 June

09:30 → 09:45 Welcome back

09:45 → 11:00 Enabling Technologies & Standards: Part 1

11:00 → 11:15 BREAK

11:15 → 11:45 Enabling Technologies & Standards: Part 2

11:45 → 12:20 (Web) Location & Identifiers

12:20 → 12:35 BREAK

12:35 → 13:10 SUMMARY

13:10 → 13:30 Wrap-up