UPSCALE project meta data
Meta data is bound to every dataset in the UPSCALE database. It summarizes all necessary information about the dataset, making finding and understanding the data much easier. Meta data plays a fundamental role in data discoverability and data reuse, thus is just as important as data itself.
The UPSCALE database (https://www.upscale.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de) is officially online since December 2022. This database supports multi-user, is openly accessible internationally by using Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) for secure communication over computer network. We use a standard metadata schema that is bind with all datasets to provide documentation of data. We provide data preservation as structured dataset (indexed by the database) and unstructured dataset (save as binary file) with versioning. We apply the request-grant-access procedure for data exchange, providing agreement to the Upscale data sharing and publishing policy (https://www.upscale.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/Download/ExportLicense.aspx). A survey was done to collect feedback and suggestions from project members. Compiling all the user requests, we classified our meta data into 7 categories: author, summary, keyword list, time, spatial, data, and references.
We used semantics from Darwin-Core (https://dwc.tdwg.org/) as basis for the ontology of our meta data because it is very commonly used standard for biological diversity data. We adapted the content from the meta data standard of Pangaea (www.pangaea.de) and GFBio (www.gfbio.org) which are potential long term data archive centers after the duration of our project.
