Speaker
Description
Building on previous work on the ICAT-based ESRF Data Portal (https://icatproject.org, https://data.esrf.fr) presented at earlier NOBUGS editions, this talk explores the next challenge: making metadata richer, more structured, and more findable, interoperable, and reusable. Our goal is to maximize scientific impact by enabling data reuse and reproducibility, capturing structured metadata across the full experiment lifecycle, from sample preparation to publication.
We leverage the ESRF technique ontology (ESRFET, https://w3id.org/PaN/ESRFET) to describe experiments through comprehensive, semantic definitions, ensuring consistent and interoperable representation across beamlines and enhanced interoperability via standards such as NeXus (https://www.nexusformat.org/). Metadata schemas are formalized and validated to ensure completeness and consistency while supporting evolving requirements. In addition, sample metadata plays a key role in linking experiments and enabling cross-experiment traceability.
These enriched metadata enable advanced features in user-facing applications, including technique-specific displays in the Data Portal, as well as integration with domain-specific portals such as the Human Organ Atlas (https://human-organ-atlas.esrf.eu/) and other emerging data collections.
We also report early progress on improving search capabilities over this richer metadata corpus, and reflect on the benefits for data discoverability, reuse and automated harvesting by metadata aggregators. Future work includes extending the approach to additional ontologies and exploring AI-assisted metadata enrichment.
