Abstract
Data maturity describes the degree of the formalisation/standardisation
of a data object with respect to FAIRness and quality of the (meta-)
data. Therefore, a high (meta-) data maturity increases the reusability
of data. Moreover, it is an important topic in data management, which is
reflected by a growing number of tools and theories trying to measure
it, e.g. the FAIR testing tools assessed by RDA(1) or the NOAA maturity
matrix(2). If the results of stewardship tasks cannot be shown directly
in the metadata, reusers of data cannot easily recognise which data is
easy to reuse. For example, the DataCite Metadata Schema does not
provide an explicit property to link/store information on data maturity
(e.g. FAIRness or quality of data/metadata). The AtMoDat project (3,
Atmospheric Model Data) aims to improve the reusability of published
atmospheric model data by scientists, the public sector, companies, and
other stakeholders. These data are valuable because they form the basis
to understand and predict natural events, including the atmospheric
circulation and ultimately the atmospheric and planetary energy budget.
As most atmospheric data has been published with DataCite DOIs, it is of
high importance that the maturity of the datasets can be easily found in
the DOI’s Metadata. Published data from other fields of research would
also benefit from easily findable maturity information. Therefore, we
developed a Maturity Indicator concept and propose to introduce it as a
new property in the DataCite Metadata Schema. This indicator is generic
and independent of any scientific discipline and data stewardship tool.
Hence, it can be used in a variety of research fields. 1
https://doi.org/10.15497/RDA00034 2 Peng et al., 2015:
https://doi.org/10.2481/dsj.14-049 3 www.atmodat.de