Enhancing interoperability and integration: facilitating metadata transfer between research platforms and data repositories

To support researchers in sharing their data effectively, KU Leuven's institutional research data repository (RDR), based on Dataverse and launched in 2022, has focused on improving usability and ease of data and metadata entry. A key aspect of this is ensuring seamless integration with existing research tools and facilitating metadata transfer to enhance interoperability and integration. This enhances both metadata quality and the overall FAIRness of the data. Achieving this required close collaboration between (meta)data experts and technical specialists to design effective and scalable solutions for data and metadata transfer. In May 2023, KU Leuven introduced an open-source Dataverse integration dashboard that enables streamlined data and file transfers from platforms such as GitHub, GitLab, and OSF. This dashboard allows to efficiently move files while maintaining the original data structure. Moreover, it ensures efficient file updates, prevents unnecessary duplication, and allows versioning at the file level by replacing only modified files using checksums. Building on this foundation of file transfers, our latest development extends the dashboard’s functionality to include metadata import from these platforms as well. By streamlining metadata extraction and mapping, we eliminate manual entry, significantly reducing errors and inconsistencies. Despite challenges in mapping metadata, due to the slight differences in semantics behind similar metadata elements, and system-specific metadata quirks, the work proved invaluable as this functionality ensures that crucial contextual information is retained during data transfers. As a result, it improves data reliability, traceability, and compliance with the FAIR principles, while optimizing research workflows. Researchers benefit from a more efficient deposit process that minimizes administrative overhead while maintaining essential contextual information.