CEDAR Metadata Schema Authoring and Registry

ARP (https://researchdata.hu/en) the Hungarian Data Repository Platform (https://researchdata.hu/en), is built around Dataverse. However, we found that to make ARP truly multidisciplinary, research communities need the ability to easily author and publish metadata schemas relevant to their scientific fields. While Dataverse provides metadata schemas via its metadata blocks and TSV input format, creating, updating, and curating these are challenging for researchers who are not metadata experts. 

To address this, we integrated CEDAR ((https://metadatacenter.org/) as the schema authoring registry tool for ARP. 

CEDAR is Stanford’s metadata-authoring platform for researchers especially in biomedical or scientific domains. It provides an authoring system for creating metadata schemas called templates, which can later be used to input metadata matching the requirements of the template. These temples can use controlled vocabularies and ontologies from OntoPortal, which is integrated with CEDAR.

With this integration, researchers can now easily create complex schemas using CEDAR’s drag-and-drop template editor and export and synchronize these with Dataverse, effectively enabling direct metadatablock authoring within Dataverse.

The schemas stored in CEDAR are used throughout the ARP ecosystem. It provides RO-Crate profiles for the AROMA editor as well as enables building advanced search queries in our knowledge graph where datasets from ARP’s Dataverse and datasets federated from other Hungarian research repositories are harvested as well, providing a single point of access to all of Hungary’s research data output.

Integration of CEDAR with Dataverse, AROMA and our knowledge graph based search engine is introduced in the following video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_ENdITtIQg 

While CEDAR has deep integration with Dataverse and ARP, it also operates as a standalone service for any data repository or system that requires easy authoring, storage, and access to metadata schemas.