Speaker
Description
High-energy, nuclear and astroparticle physics operate at comparable scales of data volume and complexity and face closely related challenges in data preservation, metadata management, and long-term reuse. While these communities have developed robust experiment-specific data curation practices, metadata remains highly specific and heterogeneous, tightly coupled to custom formats, frameworks and executional environments. This reduces interoperability and the reusability of valuable datasets beyond their original analysis context. In particular, open data on cosmic-rays collected by astroparticle physics experiments are valuable for addressing interdisciplinary research questions, such as studies of cosmic-ray-induced backgrounds for collider experiments or validation and tuning of Monte Carlo simulations (GEANT4, FLUKA).
KASCADE (KArlsruhe Shower-Core and Array DEtector) made one of the first use cases in astroparticle physics for providing open and full public access to its reconstructed datasets and digital resources through the KASCADE Cosmic-Ray Data Centre (KCDC). Today KCDC is a long-running open data archive that provides access to a variety of digital research outputs by number of experiments in high-energy astroparticle physics and undertakes constant efforts in improving its data curation procedures.
In this contribution, we present recent developments in FAIR-oriented metadata management for KCDC digital resources. We focus on metadata records enrichment to improve domain knowledge representation and metadata-driven discovery, integration, and reuse in federated computing environments. The approach is aligned with infrastructure-level initiatives such as PUNCH4NFDI (Particles, Universe, NuClei and Hadrons for German National Research Data Infrastructure) and NAPMIX (Nuclear, Astro, and Particle Metadata Integration for eXperiments) and demonstrates how metadata solutions developed in astroparticle physics can support scalable, interoperable data reuse in the broader high-energy and nuclear physics computing ecosystem.