Creating application-specific metadata profiles while improving interoperability and consistency of research data for the engineering sciences

Due to the heterogeneity of data, methods, experiments, and research questions and the necessity to describe flexible and short-lived setups, no widely used subject-specific metadata schemata or terminologies have been established for the field of engineering (as well as for other disciplines facing similar challenges). Nevertheless, it is highly desirable to realize consistent and machine-actionable documentation of research data via structured metadata.

In this article, we introduce a way to create subject specific RDF-compliant metadata profiles (in the sense of SHACL shapes) that allow precise and flexible documentation of research processes and data. We introduce a hierarchical inheritance concept for the profiles that we combine with a strategy that uses composition of relatively simple modular profiles to model complex setups. As a result, the individual profiles are highly reusable and can be applied in different contexts, which, in turn, increases the interoperability of the resulting data. We also demonstrate that it is possible to achieve a level of detail that is sufficiently specific for most applications, even when only general terms are available within existing terminologies, avoiding the need to create highly specific terminologies that would only have limited reusability.