Involving Data Creators in an Ontology-Based Design Process for Metadata Models

Abstract

Research data are the cornerstone of science and their current fast rate of production is disquieting researchers. Adequate research data management strongly depends on accurate metadata records that capture the production context of the datasets, thus enabling data interpretation and reuse. This chapter reports on the authors' experience in the development of the metadata models, formalized as ontologies, for several research domains, involving members from small research teams in the overall process. This process is instantiated with four case studies: vehicle simulation; hydrogen production; biological oceanography and social sciences. The authors also present a data description workflow that includes a research data management platform, named Dendro, where researchers can prepare their datasets for further deposit in external data repositories.