Implementing a Registry Federation for Materials Science Data Discovery

Abstract

As a result of a number of national initiatives, we are seeing rapid growth in the data important to materials science that are available over the web. Consequently, it is becoming increasingly difficult for researchers to learn what data are available and how to access them. To address this problem, the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Working Group for International Materials Science Registries (IMRR) was established to bring together materials science and information technology experts to develop an international federation of registries that can be used for global discovery of data resources for materials science. A resource registry collects high-level metadata descriptions of resources such as data repositories, archives, websites, and services that are useful for data-driven research. By making the collection searchable, it aids scientists in industry, universities, and government laboratories to discover data relevant to their research and work interests.We present the results of our successful piloting of a registry federation for materials science data discovery. In particular, we out a blueprint for creating such a federation that is capable of amassing a global view of all available materials science data, and we enumerate the requirements for the standards that make the registries interoperable within the federation. These standards include a protocol for exchanging resource descriptions and a standard metadata schema for encoding those descriptions. We summarize how we leveraged an existing standard (OAI-PMH) for metadata exchange. Finally, we review the registry software developed to realize the federation and describe the user experience.

A Controlled Vocabulary and Metadata Schema for Materials Science Data Discovery

“…We are further developing the registry software to take advantage of metadata extensions and make it more robust to an evolving metadata schema. This is described in more detail in the related Materials Resource Registry architecture paper (Plante et al 2021).…”

“…Using a controlled vocabulary provides a number of advantages that simplifies creating records and searching for records. This vocabulary was not meant to exhaustively cover all domains of materials science at all levels; rather, it was intended to assist with discovering high level data resources described in the registry (Plante et al 2021); consequently, it focuses on attributes of data and data service collections rather than individual datasets.…”

“…The software deployed to implement our pilot federation is a product called the Materials Resource Registry (MRR; Brady et al 2019), illustrated in Figures 1 and 2. More information on the federated registries architecture and implementation is available in a companion paper (Plante et al 2021).…”

Making Common Fund data more findable: Catalyzing a Data Ecosystem

“…To make Common Fund data more findable, the CFDE has created a flexible system of data federation that enables users to discover datasets from across the CF at a centralized portal without requiring Common Fund programs to move, reformat, or rehost their data, similar to the federation strategy of the Research Data Alliance (Plante et al, 2021) and The Australian Research Data Commons (Barker, Wilkinson and Treloar, 2019). The CFDE uses a sociotechnical federation system that combines proven, explicitly community driven approaches (Cruz et al, 2019;DeBarry et al, 2020;Plante et al, 2021) with a model driven catalog that incorporates metadata submitted by individual CF Program Data Coordination Centers (DCCs) into a uniform metadata model that can then be indexed and searched from a centralized portal. This uniform Crosscut Metadata Model (C2M2), supports the wide variety of dataset types, vocabularies, and metadata terms used by the individual CF DCCs.…”

“…Reusing Common Fund data for new cross-cutting analyses requires expertise in working with large files, accessing data in the cloud, harmonization, and data transformation --all before any scientific analysis can begin. Each stage presents an individually large challenge for a typical biomedical researcher or clinician which motivates labs to hire dedicated bioinformaticians (at considerable cost to NIH); confronting all of these challenges together is prohibitive for integrative analysis.To make Common Fund data more findable, the CFDE has created a flexible system of data federation that enables users to discover datasets from across the CF at a centralized portal without requiring Common Fund programs to move, reformat, or rehost their data, similar to the federation strategy of the Research Data Alliance (Plante et al, 2021) and The Australian Research Data Commons (Barker, Wilkinson and Treloar, 2019). The CFDE uses a sociotechnical federation system that combines proven, explicitly community driven approaches (Cruz et al, 2019;DeBarry et al, 2020;Plante et al, 2021) with a model driven catalog that incorporates metadata submitted by individual CF Program Data Coordination Centers (DCCs) into a uniform metadata model that can then be indexed and searched from a centralized portal.…”