Metadata for DiscoRSE, an Open Educational Resource for RSEs

Findability, interoperability, and reusability of training materials, at least at an entry level, are easier to achieve by using rich and community-agreed metadata. Training materials for Research Software Engineers (RSEs) are commonly scattered along different platforms (e.g., dedicated Open Educational Resources (OERs), GitHub, Zenodo) and formats (text-based, Jupyter Notebooks, videos). Furthermore, they are also described using a disparate set of metadata schemas, vocabularies, and/or ontologies, making it more difficult for registries to aggregate materials and present them in a harmonized way. Here we present preliminary results from a community-driven initiative to address this challenge by leveraging schema.org, in particular its LearningResource type. Together with Quadriga, NFDI4DataScience, and DiscoRSE, we co-organized a hackathon in September 2025 that brought together 13 domain experts and metadata specialists representing various resources around the topic of training materials. The primary goal was to collaboratively develop ‘crosswalks’, i.e., a spreadsheet using LearningResource as a reference to identify commonalities and differences wrt those resources represented by the participants (AMB, Base4NFDI, Bioschemas, DALIA, DiscoRSE, ELIXIR Germany, m-TeSSX, NFDI4DataScience, Photon and Neutron Training,Quadriga, RDMT4NFDI, Skills4EOSC). This effort aimed to establish a lightweight yet robust common standard for describing RSE training content. This talk will present the key outcomes of this hackathon, including the analysis of the crosswalks together with some of the challenges and opportunities identified from them. This includes, for instance, identifying gaps in the schema.org vocabulary and the most common elements across the platforms. The findings demonstrate the viability of using schema.org as an interoperability layer and provide a blueprint for a harmonized RSE training metadata ecosystem which we aim at realizing in our project DiscoRSE. This work is part of deRSE26 - Conference for Research Software Engineering in Germany, see https://events.hifis.net/event/2945/contributions/21175/ This work has been partially funded by the Klaus Tschira Stiftung, as part of the support programme Scientific software.