Metadata Editor

Research Data Management (RDM) revolves around structured data following specific schema definitions, e.g. metadata, Application Programming Interfaces (API), etc. The direct use of these data is impractical for scientists as some formats are non-human-readable. Moreover, its integration into existing user interfaces, e.g. websites, portals, etc is very time-consuming and represents a recurrent task as well as it requires a deep knowledge of various technologies. Thus, a generic user interface, which allows the metadata management or to address research data services, will provide a simple access point to scientists. In addition to that, the validation of metadata before sending a REST request to a service represents a very fundamental quality .
For these purposes, the Metadata Editor has been developed at the “Data Exploitation Methods” (DEM) department, that is part of the computing center “Steinbuch Centre for Computing” (SCC) of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
The editor is realized as a JavaScript library allowing the generation of web forms as well as the management of JSON metadata in an intuitive and generic way. This metadata is produced by other services and presented to the library as JSON resources. ... mehrMoreover, the editor enables the validation of JSON metadata based on a developer-provided JSON schemas. In order to fulfill these functionalities, the JSON Form Library is used. In addition to that, the editor allows the user to perform CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations and additional operations in case further requirements need to be fulfilled.
The Collection Registry, which implements the Collection API recommended by the RDA Research Data Collections Working Group and has been developed at the DEM department, has been adopted as a use case to test the different functionalities of the editor. The editor has been successfully integrated in the Collection Registry ensuring that the different REST requests can be executed through the provided Graphical User Interface (GUI). Moreover, the JSON inputs can be given through the generated web forms and validated against a defined JSON schema. Thus, the service become more intuitive and easier-to-use for scientists and the validation enables the user to provide correct inputs.
This work has been supported by the research program ‘Engineering Digital Futures’ of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers and the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration Platform.