Signposting support has been introduced in Fairdata Etsin to improve the machine-actionable discovery and reuse of research datasets and their metadata. The feature has been available in production since June 2026, and a recent update introduced minor improvements. Most notably, author links now use ORCID identifiers, enabling more reliable researcher identification.
Known deviations from the Signposting documentation
The implementation largely follows the Signposting specification, but there are currently two known differences:
- License links currently point to the URI identifiers used in Fairdata code lists rather than SPDX license URIs.
- A dataset may contain more than one license link. The Signposting documentation specifies a maximum of one license link, but since Metax supports multiple licenses for a dataset, this restriction has not been enforced in the implementation.
Signposting support is available automatically for all datasets published in Etsin and improves interoperability and automated discovery across services and platforms.
How can users view Signposting information?
Signposting information is provided through HTTP Link headers. Users can inspect these headers using browser developer tools, command-line tools such as curl, or other tools capable of displaying HTTP response headers for a dataset landing page.
