Metadata from Metax to the National Research Information Hub

CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd. is building a National Research Information Hub at the behest of the Ministry of Education and Culture. The Research Information Hub collects and shares information on research conducted in Finland, such as information on publications, research infrastructures and research projects.

The aim of the project, which started in 2017, is to provide a single, open and comprehensive view of all research conducted in Finland. The Research Information Hub’s portal was opened in June 2020 at Research.fi, where metadata on research outputs can be viewed from different perspectives with different filters and easy access to data sources.

As the latest feature of the Research.fi portal, the possibility to browse metadata for research data was introduced on the 31st of March 2021. The Research Information Hub uses metadata warehouse Metax as a source of metadata for research data. Metax is part of the national Fairdata services and contains metadata for Finnish research data.

In addition to handling metadata exchange between Fairdata services, Metax includes metadata created with the research dataset description tool Qvain, as well as metadata harvested from other sources. It is also possible to import metadata for research data into Metax via the interface it provides (Metax REST API).

In the future, the aim of the Research Information Hub is to compile the metadata for research data stored by Finnish organizations in their own systems as widely as possible. Currently, Metax’s data sources of are the Language Bank of Finlandthe Finnish Social Science Data Archivethe Finnish Environment Institute, and University of Jyväskylä.

Research organizations can provide metadata for their own research data for harvesting to Fairdata services by contacting CSC’s customer service at servicedesk@csc.fi.

Visit the Research.fi portal to view and test the new feature!

If you encounter errors in the metadata for research data on the Research.fi portal, you can report them on the portal’s Give feedback form via e-mail at tiedejatutkimus@csc.fi.

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