Flexibility in Metadata Schemes and Standardisation: the Case of CMDI and DANS Research Data Repositories

ISKO Knowledge Organisation Research Observatory workshop, 24 November 2021. RESEARCH REPOSITORIES AND DATAVERSE: NEGOTIATING METADATA, VOCABULARIES AND DOMAIN NEEDS. The development of metadata schemes in data repositories (and other content providers) has always been a process of negotiation between the needs of the designated user communities and the content of the collection on the one side and standards developed in the field. Automatisation has both enabled and enforced standardisation and alignment of metadata schemes (see as an example). But, while designated user communities turned from being local users to global ones (due to web services), their specific needs have not vanished. Technology offers possibilities to give the aforementioned negotiation a new form. In this presentation, we present the Dataverse platform, used by many data repositories. We show - using the case of the CMDI metadata and the CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure)community - how the Dataverse common core set of metadata called Citation Block can be extended with custom fields defined as a discipline specific metadata block. In particular, we show how these custom fields can be connected to a distributed network of authoritative controlled vocabularies. So, that at the end semantic search is possible. The presentation highlights opportunities and challenges, based on our own experiences. Related work has been presented at the CLARIN Annual Conference 202