(Digital) Research Data and Metadata

The presentation addresses what research data are and how they can be made available in the short, medium and long term (reusable). In particular, the role of metadata and data formats will be discussed.

Almost all (digital) data can potentially become research data. Once a scientific project decides to use data to gain knowledge, these data inevitably become research data. Research also collects a variety of data in surveys and experiments, or creates collections and editions of digital/digitised artifacts (corpora, editions) that are the basis for further research. Often software – from scripts to stand-alone programs – is also included when talking about data, and in some projects data and related tools are hardly conceptually separated.

Metadata is the name for data that describes other data. However, depending on the research question, a 'metadatum' can itself become a variable in the research design – and thus a research datum.

In recent years, FAIR has become a much-noted acronym: data should be Findable, Accessible (have regulated access), Interoperable (use interoperable formats), and thus overall Reuseable.

In our talk we will exemplify different ways from (digital) data to research data to archived files. We also show that information can be stored in many different ways. These examples are meant to invite participants to get more involved with data (formats). We explain how(so) metadata is central to the reusability of research data.

In addition, we show that various formats are suitable and useful for concrete use, but less suitable for sharing or long-term archiving of data in terms of interoperability and sustainability. Finally, we briefly address the question of scripts and tools and the problems of making them available to other researchers in the medium and long term.