Metadata for research data. Video recording by CSC, Jessica Parland-von Essen & Johan Kylander (41 min 13 s)
Practical guide about how to document research data: Siiri Fuchs, & Mari Elisa Kuusniemi. (2018, December 4). Making a research project understandable - Guide for data documentation (Version 1.2). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1914401
University of Jyväskylä guide to data documentation with practical discipline and research method specific examples.
In many reseach fields and disciplines there are traditions to publish metadata in international and/or discipline specific repositories like Figshare, The Cambridge Structural Database, Zenodo, RCSB-PDB, Strasbourg Astronomical Data Center
All trusted repositories make data findable and citable in publications.
Metadata and documentation are about labeling, describing and annotating data. It helps to remember the details later, helps others understand your research, enables verifying research findings and reproducing and/or replicating data. Published metadata makes data citable. The concept "metadata" is part of larger concept "documentation".
Discoverable metadata - always highly structured, machine-readable and open data about data - can broadly be broken into e.g.
Discoverable metadata is supplemented with documentation e.g.laboratory diaries, code books, field notes, questionnaires; documentation of settings and calibrations of instruments; description of research method.
Documentation is done in different levels like research project (e.g. methodology), file level (e.g. relationships between files) and variable/item level (e.g. how variable was generated). Openness level of documentation varies from open to limited (controlled, restricted) access.
Examples of documentation forms: laboratory notebook, field notebook, or research notebook; e-Lab Notebook (ELN); readme.txt; templates: datasheet, collection sheet, or field sheet; data dictionary; codebook; metadata schema, standard, or taxonomy. Read more in Briney, Kristin A. (2022) Research Data Documentation Methods. [Teaching Resource] (Unpublished)
INSPIRE directive. Infrastructure for spatial information in Europe
The INSPIRE Directive aims to create a European Union spatial data infrastructure for the purposes of EU environmental policies and policies or activities which may have an impact on the environment. This European Spatial Data Infrastructure will enable the sharing of environmental spatial information among public sector organisations, facilitate public access to spatial information across Europe and assist in policy-making across boundaries.
Closely connected to the DOI system - is a list of core metadata properties chosen for the identification of a resource. Consist e.g. relation types to describe relations between RD (e.g. supplement to, version, part of, identical to etc.)
The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI)
Standard for the names of countries, dependent territories ISO 3166-1
