This report provides an inventory of data formats and metadata standards that are currently used and relevant for the research infrastructures currently managed by the SSHOC main stakeholders, recommendations of specific formats and standards for increasing interoperability, and prioritisations for providing conversion services and planning solutions. In the context of this deliverable, selected experts from the SSHOC stakeholder's infrastructures were interviewed about research data and metadata use in their respective infrastructures. Special attention was paid to interoperability aspects. The interviews and the desk research indicated both the diversity of the SSHOC communities and the diversity of metadata standards used and needed. Therefore, this deliverable recommends a variety of metadata standards and data formats. The recommended metadata standards include domain specific metadata standards for each domain but also Dublin Core and relaxed DataCite for all domains. The diversity of SSHOC communities is also shown in their data: there is a large selection of different media types and an enormous selection of data formats. The recommended data formats include a small selection of data formats for some general media types e.g. images, text annotations. The format for controlled vocabularies was also examined and SKOS was selected as the recommended format. It is worth noting that hardly any recommendation can fulfill all the use cases, so other metadata standards, data formats and formats for controlled vocabularies may still be used when necessary. The priorities for providing conversion services and planning solutions were decided based on the interviews and on the needs from other SSHOC tasks. The challenges and solutions are analysed for each SSHOC community and both the priority and the needed actions are specified.

FAIR principles Interoperability SSHOC data interoperability metadata interoperability metadata standard

Broeder, Daan / Trippel, Thorsten / Degl'Innocenti, Emiliano / Giacomi, Roberta / Sanesi, Maurizio / Kleemola, Mari / Moilanen, Katja / Ala-Lahti, Henri / Jordan, Caspar / Alfredsson, Iris / L'Hours, Hervé / Ďurčo, Matej

SSHOC