Brief description

Good scientific practice requires precise and comprehensible documentation of findings. This is all the more important when researchers are sharing and publishing their own research data or want to reuse archived third-party data. Research data management based on largely standardised metadata is consequently of vital importance. Standardised metadata should deliver information on the origin, content and context of the research data described. FAIR principles state that metadata must be understandable to humans and machines.

Sharing of research data often begins sooner than widely expected, for example, when handing over a project within one’s own research unit. Good documentation of data is therefore imperative. As a consequence metadata is hugely significant, particularly in the case of complex projects. Which tools are used, under which conditions or with which parameters research data is generated is in many cases just as important as the data itself.

The research project “Applying Interoperable Metadata Standards (AIMS) 2”, sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG), addresses the challenges of metadata management. The interdisciplinary team from various infrastructure and scientific institutions is building a platform to enable researchers to create and share metadata schemata. High specificity with maximum applicability and reusability of the metadata schemata can be achieved by the use of a modelling concept which relies on inheritance and modularity. This will increase the willingness of researchers to integrate structured metadata into their research processes, paving the way for common metadata standards as they become more widespread. In the first funding phase of the project, the modelling concept was developed, as well as the software for creating, managing and curating metadata profiles.

n the second funding phase, the focus is on tapping into further specialist communities from the fields of materials science and experimental physics, as well as further developing the existing platform. Another key concern is integration into the research workflows of participating research groups. To this end, the integration of AIMS profiles into electronic laboratory notebooks is planned to ensure that the metadata concept realised in AIMS is integrated directly into the processes of participating researchers. By considering the interoperability of the resulting metadata schemata and interfaces, the generic transfer of these solutions to other research fields is explicitly pursued.

ongoing, 01.05.2025 – 30.04.2028

• Dr. Marc Fuhrmans
• Jürgen Windeck

• Prof. Dr. Matthias S. Müller, IT Center der RWTH Aachen
• Prof. Dr. Sylvia Speller, Universität Rostock
• Antje Theise, Universitätsbibliothek Rostock
• Prof. Dr. Christoph Eberl, Universität Freiburg
• Dr. Christoph Schweizer, Fraunhofer IWM, Freiburg

• AIMS
• DFG-Detailseite
• Source Code
• NFDI4ING Metadata Profile Service