ESRA 2023 sessions by theme

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Metadata are at the heart of the movement towards FAIR data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and are gaining more and more importance. These metadata need to follow certain standards and need to be collected and managed in appropriate tools throughout the entire survey lifecycle.

Ideally, a data infrastructure can be implemented based on this, which fosters the FAIR principles at all points of data exchange between the involved parties (data producers, providers, archives, users, and other stakeholders):
- Findable: e.g. search portals use standardized metadata to harvest information from data producers and data providers
- Accessible: e.g. data consumers have to be able to access information without human interaction, guided by standardized communications protocols.
- Interoperable: e.g. data users have to be able to understand data and treat and analyze them in an appropriate way
- Reusable: e.g. data is documented in standard, domain relevant way allowing proper secondary data analysis

Metadata are not to be prepared ex-post, but are ideally collected whenever they first appear during the survey life-cycle, e.g. information on the funding institutions during the project proposal phase, data collection protocols and instruments in order to understand the data during survey development, or data alterations during curation. Hence there is a need for proper (meta)data management tools right from the start and through all steps of the process.

This session will discuss contributions to the broader topic of metadata infrastructure within any part of the data lifecycle, and offers space to assess the progress made in this endeavor. We welcome and encourage presentations regarding the implementation of metadata systems–ideally fostering FAIR data provisioning and use–regardless of the systems’ maturity.