Legal metadata standards

Deliverable D3.6.2 (Clusters of agrosystems data in accordance with relevant legal categories) revealed significant differences in licensing practices, access restrictions, data protection considerations and regulatory obligations among FAIRagro’s Research Data Infrastructures (RDIs). Deliverable D3.6.3 builds on this by addressing the need to represent the legal properties of agrosystem data in a uniform, machine-readable standard that supports FAIR data principles and integrates consistently across the heterogeneous RDIs. Three main application areas emerged from the analysis, each with distinct requirements for metadata standardisation: Licences, which express the rights and obligations of reuse; data access, which describes access conditions or restrictions; and regulatory requirements, which document obligations arising from legal frameworks such as the Nagoya Protocol. This document represents Version 1 (22 December 2025) and should be regarded as a living document, subject to ongoing refinement and updates, especially those resulting from the planned workshop “Legal Metadata in FDOs and Infrastructures of Plant Sciences”.