Metadata Game Changers, Stanford University, and Dryad receive NSF Funding to improve metadata quality and connect repositories

Cite this blog as Habermann, T. (2021). Metadata Game Changers, Stanford University, and Dryad receive NSF Funding to improve metadata quality and connect repositories. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.59350/fpvgy-a5719

Metadata Game Changers, the Center for Expanded Data Annotation and Retrieval (CEDAR) at Stanford University, and Dryad are thrilled to announce their joint National Science Foundation two-year EAGER award focused on increasing the quality of disciplinary metadata and bridging the gap between generalist and disciplinary data repositories. 

Increasing the quality of metadata for past and future datasets requires interoperable, seamless workflows. This team will be working together to pilot approaches that increase the quality of datasets deposited into the Dryad data repository while streamlining the submission processes. Examples of these pilot projects include displaying the right scientific metadata schema for datasets depending on standard fields in Dryad, as well as using metadata fields to flag datasets that would be best fit at a disciplinary repository (and piloting integrations with those repositories).

The approach will rely on the ability of the CEDAR technology to acquire and encode standardized metadata for different scientific communities, using established reporting guidelines for different classes of experiments and standard terms for authoring  metadata. Much of this work also depends on developing learning algorithms based on the last 40,000+ published datasets in Dryad.

“Existing metadata are an exciting learning set for discerning patterns that can be used to streamline the metadata creation process. We want to  ensure that data are being submitted to the best fit repository with the right metadata. ” said Ted Habermann.

The goal of these pilot explorations is to understand and build interoperable, open source approaches for repositories to use to improve the quality of metadata and datasets published and begin to find ways that disciplinary repositories and general repositories can collaborate to more effectively support the research community.

The work ahead will be led by Principal Investigator Dr. Ted Habermann and the team welcomes feedback or ideas from the community. For more information, follow along at our blogs (Metadata Game Changers, Dryad, and CEDAR) or get in touch at ted@metadatagamechangers.com.