Have you ever heard of a metadata catalog?

A young research group contacted the Service Center Research Data with a request for assistance in managing their data. The group explores various aspects of road traffic and makes video recordings for this purpose. In addition to the video footage, a number of other parameters (metadata) are documented. Metadata includes e.g. the location in the form of geo-coordinates, the weather at the time of the traffic observation or the time at which the observation was made.

The researchers had the following requirement for their data management: All research data should be stored in a way that allows for targeted retrieval in order to answer very specific research questions. Depending on the research question, the researchers may only need video footage from a rainy weekend or from a sunny weekday in the early morning hours for their analyses.

During the consultation, a "research-oriented" folder structure for the network drive was devised as a solution for this requirement. This structure is systematically based on the metadata of the individual traffic observations.

In order to additionally facilitate finding answers to research questions, a system for filtering and aggregating the research data was implemented. For this purpose, the Service Center Research Data developed a metadata catalog based on TU Dresden's SharePoint service: the metadata of the individual traffic observations are uploaded to SharePoint, where they can be easily searched and filtered. Subsequently, the associated research data can be packaged and made available to the user at a defined storage location.

Does the presented example look familiar to you? Or would you like to find out more about the potential of a metadata catalog?

If so, we would be glad to hear from you!