MEDIAS: Development of methods for efficient access to research data in data portals

Background

The user-centric provision of information about data and the data itself is increasingly gaining importance through the general availability of new approaches for the publication, common usage, and archival of research data. For potential users of research data, the “data landscape” is complex, unclear, and can be understood and explored only with major manual efforts.

Additionally, data sources are often only insufficiently described through meta data, which makes it difficult to understand the data sources and hinders the initial exploration of unknown data sets. Even worse, there is a large variety of available research data sources in distributed data repositories with varying geospatial and temporal resolutions and fluctuating data quality that a user can choose from.

Goals

• Better understanding of requirements for data portals from different user groups
• Development of semantic meta data models for research data in selected application domains
• Improvement of the efficient construction of consistent, correct and ideally complete meta data descriptions
• Improvement of efficient data access through targeted user guidance and recommendations during data search
• Enable simplified maintenance and extension of knowledge base

Applications

Scientific:

• Simplified data access to research data from different scientific application domains

Societal :

• Transparent and intuitive provision of research data for the general public

Results

(Project started  July 1st, 2020)