Dr Vincent Fazio1, Dr Jens Klump2, Dr Lesley Wyborn3
1CSIRO, Clayton, Australia, 2CSIRO, Kensington, Australia, 3ANU, Canberra, Australia
Metadata is critical to enabling datasets to be Found, Accessed and then made Interoperable with other data sets, as well as Reusable by others beyond the original purpose for which it was collected i.e. FAIR. Although Wilkinson et al. (2016) emphasised in 2016 that the FAIR principles apply to machine-to-machine interactions, in 2022, most modern research infrastructures struggle to achieve this.
Recently AuScope reviewed its existing infrastructure, with a view to upgrading and enabling machine-to-machine interactions. To approach this, AuScope defined three main types of actors: dataset providers; metadata catalogue providers; and consumers accessing either by endpoints or human readable landing pages. Each of these makes its own contribution to the overall metadata picture and each has its own set of choices and challenges when improving conformity to the FAIR principles, particularly for machine readability as follows:
- At the Data Provider level: greater awareness is needed for adequate quality and quantity of metadata;
- At the Catalogue Level: richer metadata and best practice was achieved by upgrading to the latest ISO 19115 standard, which provided the ability for geospatial referencing;
- At the Consumer Level: choices needed to be made on how best to present metadata, in particular for machine-to-machine access to data.
This talk will outline the decisions made and implementation steps, including consideration of new and evolving types of consumer interaction, and present the technologies and strategies that were utilised when we rolled back the carpet and tinkered underneath, to improve the FAIRness of the AuScope portal.
Biography:
Vincent is a senior software engineer who has acquired a broad range of software development skills over his 20+ year career. These skills range from creating websites that display 3D geological models to improving the FAIR (Findable Accessible Interoperable Reusable) compliance of metadata catalogues.