Workshop: Interoperability of Metadata Standards in Cross-Domain Science, Health, and Social Science Applications
Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics, October 1-5, 2018 in Wadern, Germany
Standards are a vital tool enabling integration and semantic linking of data within and between disciplines. However, standards tend to get developed and adopted within disciplines or application domains with little consideration of cross-discipline requirements and technologies, so data integration can often only be easily achieved within and between closely allied fields. Addressing global scientific challenges that depend on cross-discipline integration remains difficult. The challenge is to make cross-discipline data integration a routine aspect of data-driven science.
Metadata support data discovery, selection, access and use, and are critical for data integration. Data from different sources/domains should be described in a way that cross-discipline discovery can detect and access the relevant data collections, and so that transformations and analyses can be automated. The use of cross-discipline data should become efficient, scalable and reproducible, enabling discipline-neutral data processing and analysis tools to be applied. Furthermore it would be possible to apply (meta-)data mining approaches and reasoning. In sum, new opportunities of insights and realization will develop.
A CODATA initiative on interdisciplinary data integration1 is seeking to explore these challenges and opportunities in relation to three specific case studies in interdisciplinary research into infectious disease outbreaks, disaster risk and resilient cities. These case studies provide a concrete focus for exploring the potential of interoperability and data integration through metadata alignment.