At the end of April 2026, RISEnergy hosted an online workshop on metadata management.
The workshop focused on two key platforms, Coscine and AIMS, as part of the RISEnergy project.
1. The Core Platforms: Coscine & AIMS
The workshop established a clear distinction and workflow between the two platforms:
- Coscine: An online platform for managing research data throughout its lifecycle. It offers cloud storage for raw data enriched with contextual information through multiple metadata profiles. The platform functions as a collaborative workspace where members can manage files, control access permissions, and archive data securely for up to 10 years.
- AIMS (Applying Interoperable Metadata Standards): A specialized tool used to design custom metadata profiles. These profiles act as templates to ensure data is recorded in a standardized, interoperable format before being integrated into Coscine.
2. Key Metadata Management Outcomes
The sessions emphasized that proper metadata management is essential for making research FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable).
- Standardization: Users were encouraged to use existing metadata schemas like Dublin Core, schema.org, Open Energy Metadata to organize information consistently.
- Interoperability via IRIs: A major conclusion was the necessity of using Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) for metadata fields (e.g., using `http://schema.org/instrument` for a testbench) to ensure terms are machine-readable and standardized across the scientific community.
- Ontology Integration: The workshop demonstrated how to link metadata fields to established ontologies using tools like the TIB terminology service or the Linked Open Vocabularies to find appropriate ontology tterms.
3. Practical Best Practices & Conclusions
The workshop highlighted several technical recommendations for researchers:
- Data Formatting: Always use ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) for date formats to avoid ambiguity.
- Field Properties: When creating metadata schemas, designers should specify properties such as whether a field is required, its datatype (e.g., boolean, decimal), and any regex patterns for validation (e.g., time formats like `hh:mm:ss`).
- Submission & Feedback Workflow: Once a metadata schema has been designed in AIMS, it is recommended to download it as a Turtle file prior to submission. Following submission, the metadata schema will undergo a technical review conducted by the Coscine platform developers and maintainers to verify that IRIs are correctly associated with the respective metadata fields, datatypes, and related structural elements.
- Collaborative Development: The “PEMFC” (Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell) use case illustrated how complex experimental data (e.g., active area size, cell temperature, gas flow rates) can be systematically mapped into a digital metadata schema
4. Integration with RISEnergy
The workshop concluded with a direct path for participants to join the RISEnergy project space in Coscine by registering with their institutional ID or ORCID and providing their account email to the project administrators (m.lazher@fz-juelich.de). hearing from you!