CESSDA Data Catalogue – FAIR enough?
The latest release of the CESSDA Data Catalogue is focused on improving interoperability with external organisations.
The CESSDA Data Catalogue (CDC) contains the metadata of data holdings of CESSDA’s Service Providers. It’s a one-stop-shop for research and discovery, enabling access to extensive collections of data relevant to social science research. The CDC is also part of the EOSC marketplace.
New features
Metadata from the CDC can now easily be shared with external providers such as OpenAire, GoTriple and B2Find. This is made possible by the new OAI-PMH endpoint. The endpoint exposes the metadata in DublinCore, DataCite and DDI 2.5 Codebook formats.
A search API has also been developed. This allows external agencies to use the search functionality of the Data Catalogue and to integrate the Data Catalogue into their own websites and platforms.
John Shepherdson, Cloud Platform Delivery Director, said: “From now on, CESSDA Service Provider catalogues can run the same queries locally and in the CDC at the same time. This will give researchers a greater range of study data to work with.”
Metadata in JSON-LD/RDF format has been embedded in the pages including keywords and persistent identifiers. This means that tools like F-UJI can evaluate the Data Catalogue, with the results being used to improve the FAIRness of the metadata.
Taina Jääskeläinen, Service Owner of the CDC, FSD, said: “We have enhanced the handling of non-English metadata. There have also been behind the scenes improvements to the harvesting and validating of the metadata.”
Bug fixes
Significant bug fixes present in this release include improving the behaviour of the back and forward actions. This is especially helpful in relation to navigating between different language versions of the same study.
Invalid URLs are now filtered out, preventing issues where external links wouldn’t work.
The publisher of the study is now displayed correctly on the detail page.
Notes
Due to backend changes for the OAI-PMH endpoint, bookmarked links may no longer work. No data has been removed from the catalogue.