Speaker
Description
The PUNCH4NFDI consortium (Particles, Universe, NuClei and Hadrons for German National Research Data Infrastructure) comprises astro-, astroparticle, particle and nuclear physics—communities historically employing computationally-intensive research on big data. The data life cycles are characterized by worked out data curation practices; highly diverse metadata, being embedded in custom file headers, storage hierarchies, or analysis frameworks; and a lack of explicit machine-actionable representations of data-related domain knowledge. This limits cross-community data discoverability, and reuse. Achieving these while preserving compatibility with existing community standards necessitates innovative solutions for management of digital research outputs at the PUNCH4NFDI Science Data Platform (SDP) level as well as supporting the full cycle of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) metadata curation.
The basic units to capture research outcomes in an interoperable and reproducible way are Digital Research Products (DRPs). By bundling digital resources with rich contextual and provenance metadata, DRPs are designed to enable reproducible and modifiable analyses across the federated PUNCH4NFDI infrastructure and support blind discovery, live analysis, and live peer review.
DRP metadata constitutes the central layer of PUNCH4NFDI multi-layer metadata architecture. It builds on the core DataCite-based layer, and extends DRP terms through the layer of discipline-specific metadata. Schema alignment activities define which concepts belong to the cross-community core and how they map to provider-specific conventions. The resulting hierarchical model enables consistent metadata reuse and full traceability across the research process.
We present PUNCH4NFDI SDP multi-layer metadata architecture and underlying services, covering integration of diverse use cases and outlining ongoing efforts toward FAIR data in fundamental physics.