Metadata schema and mapping service for FIB/SEM serial-sectioning and computed tomography

Tomographic methods on different length scales using different physical principles are well established tools in Materials Science and Engineering (MSE). One of the challenges from a research data management (RDM) perspective in this field is that the tomography process, i.e. data acquisition, is only one part of the entire experimental workflow of materials characterization, which starts with a sample and ends with a reconstructed 3D model. Each step, from sample preparation to data acquisition to post-processing and 3D reconstruction, takes place in its own ecosystem of hardware and software, and there is little standardization in the MSE community on how to collect and use metadata to describe the workflow. This ultimately hinders the (re-)use of data according to the FAIR principles.

In an attempt to improve this situation, we present an excerpt of the ongoing work in Participant Project 13 "Tomography and microstructure-based modeling" of the NFDI-MatWerk consortium. In a collaboration of domain and metadata experts, metadata schemas for the representation of the data acquisition process in FIB/SEM serial sectioning and computed tomography have been developed and implemented using the FAIR Digital Object concept. ... mehrFurthermore, an automated extraction and mapping service for extracting metadata from existing FIB/SEM tomography datasets and mapping them to the terms of the metadata schema is presented, which provides a one-click solution to collect tomography metadata scattered across different files and write it into a JSON metadata document according to the developed schema. The final result is a FAIR Digital Object pointing to both data and metadata resources. This poster covers both the technical aspects and the researcher's perspective.