Speaker
Description
The NAPMIX project aims to establish a cross-domain FAIR-compliant metadata framework for the Nuclear, Astro, and Particle (NAP) physics communities. A core challenge is reconciling the evolving nature of experimental metadata, progressively refined from proposal through data taking, calibration and analysis, with the need to preserve reconstructable citation and publication states.
This contribution presents NAPMIX’s architectural strategy for resolving this "Paradox of Persistence". Instead of treating metadata as either fully static or freely mutable, NAPMIX introduces a Live Metadata Layer implemented as a governance overlay around the existing platform. The live operational record remains editable, while frozen, self-describing metadata snapshots preserve the state used for sharing, publication or DOI-related workflows.
Post-snapshot changes are handled through configurable governance policies applied to relevant fields and relations. Depending on their significance, changes may be audited, require rationale and methodology, or trigger review for a possible new published version. DataCite then provides the external DOI metadata and versioning mechanism, while NAPMIX governs the scientific metadata evolution behind it.
This approach supports reproducible citation, explainable metadata evolution and continued scientific enrichment without requiring a disruptive redesign of the existing NAPMIX metadata platform.