Reimagining Catalogs and Repositories to Enhance the FAIRness of Research Data

Research data archives typically comprise catalogs and repositories that are tightly woven together in which research data are both discovered and accessed through the same platform. While this archive design enables the catalog to reflect the repository in substantial detail, it can limit discoverability and interoperability. Furthermore, studies can contain diverse types of data such as surveys, biomarkers, and neuroimages that may be available through different specialized repositories. These different repositories often have different metadata schemas. We propose to loosen the tight coupling of a catalog and to a single repository by catalogs incorporating study metadata from many different repositories.Catalogs will enable data discovery while repositories will provide data access. Repositories host and deliver access to the research data while catalogs provide searchable listings of the contents of repositories. As a result, the FAIRness of research data will enhance. Our proposed archive design requires API (application programming interface) for each repository, so that catalogs can communicate with repositories to produce searchable listings. Catalogs typically incorporate metadata from their own repositories. In our reformulation, catalogs would pull metadata from multiple repositories. For example, in the new design, a catalog might connect with three repositories. “Repository 1” could be Dataverse; “Repository 2” is Collectica for longitudinal studies; and “Repository 3” could be dbGaP. Other types of repositories host videos, neuroimages, characteristics of geographic areas, and qualitative data. This design would enable researchers to discover different types of data that are related. The new design will also enhance interoperability as repositories will need to provide a standards-based API for communication with different catalogs. We will present how our formulation enhances findability and interoperability of research data. Moreover, we show how to include different metadata schema into one catalog.