Metadata: The Not-So-Secret Ingredient for FAIR Research Data in Helmholtz
Creators: name: Lemster, Christine
name: Curdt, Constanze
name: Lorenz, Sören
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023
Subjects: Metadata
Helmholtz Association
FAIR research data
Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration

description: The Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres set up the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC) platform at the end of 2019 to address the topic of metadata within its organization and continuously increase the connectivity of its distributed research data ecosystem on all levels. To achieve this, HMC aims to provide comprehensive services, consulting, information, and tools for efficient metadata handling through jointly developed, shared, and consolidated resources. The vision is to create a sustainable, distributed, semantically enriched FAIR Helmholtz data space.


Over the last three years we as HMC have put great efforts into reaching our goals. Our work is focusses on actions following three key strategic areas:



	
Assessing and monitoring the state of FAIR data across Helmholtz
	Through a mixed method approach we are continuously learning about the research data ecosystem within Helmholtz and beyond. Those findings enable us to identify concrete actions to improve research data handling with Helmholtz. By transparently communicating the results to relevant stakeholders, we also enable other individuals and institutions to adapt their approaches.
	
Facilitating connectivity of Helmholtz research data
	The envisioned Helmholtz data space will enable scientists to easily find and combine research data from different scientific domains. Within our platform its technical and social features are defined, needed tools are developed and deployed, and workflows for e.g., semantic harmonization are set up.
	
Transforming (meta)data recommendations into implementations. 
	Our stakeholders act on different levels within the Helmholtz research data ecosystem. Through offering practical advice, training and guidelines on implementing community recommendations we aim to bridge different levels in knowledge, communication and technical capabilities between them and harmonize the approaches across Helmholtz. To further enable our community, an annual project call funds project on practical metadata challenges within the domains.



It is crucial to engage with all stakeholders of the Helmholtz research data ecosystem to create a functional FAIR data space: researchers, data professionals, research data infrastructure providers, and policy makers alike. Therefore, we need a multi stakeholder approach, where our methods and formats are adapted to the specific needs of the addressed stakeholder. Through our structure, which is aligned with the Helmholtz research fields (Aeronautics, Space and Transport; Earth and Environment; Energy; Health; Information and Matter), we can easily address the different needs within the individual communities.


To ensure that our work is complementary to the on-going national, European, and international efforts we are actively involved in relevant initiatives. On a global level we are contributing to initiatives like the Research Data Alliance and the FAIR Digital Objects Forum and on the European level to EOSC task forces. Within the evolving, national research data landscape there are close ties to various relevant subject specific NFDI consortia (e.g. NFDI Matwerk, NFDI4Ing, NFDI4Energy), NFDI sections and the Base4NFDI consortia, but also to activities beyond that. With the consortia we are working on topics like tools, services, or community building efforts.


With this poster, we want to present our approach, some of our results and our future plans. Through sharing our experiences and ideas with the broader research data infrastructure community, we want to engage in an active discussion on (meta)data and relevant tasks ahead, connect to other initiatives, identify synergies and map out our path to a FAIR data ecosystem together.