FAIR WISH project – developing metadata templates for IGSN Registration for various sample types

The International Generic Sample Number (IGSN) is a unique and persistent identifier for physical objects that was originally developed in the Geosciences. In 2022, after 10 years of service operation and more than 10 million registered samples worldwide, IGSN e.V. and DataCite have agreed on a strategic partnership. As a result, all IGSNs are now registered as DataCite DOIs and the IGSN metadata schema will be mapped to the DataCite Metadata Schema according to agreed guidelines. This will, on the one hand, enrich the very limited mandatory information shared by IGSN allocating agents so far. On the other hand, the DataCite metadata schema is not designed for the comprehensive description of physical objects and their provenance.

The IGSN Metadata Schema is modular: the mandatory Registration Schema only included information on the IGSN identifier, the minting agent and a date - complemented by the IGSN Description Schema (for data discovery) and additional extensions by the allocating agents to customise the sample description according to their sample’s subdomain.

Within the project “FAIR Workflows to establish IGSN for Samples in the Helmholtz Association (FAIR WISH)”, funded by the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration Platform (HMC), we

(1) customised the GFZ-specific schema to describe water, soil and vegetation samples and

(2) support the metadata collection by the individual researcher with a user-friendly, easy-to-use batch registration template in MS Excel.

The information collected with the template can directly be converted to XML files (or JSON in the future) following the IGSN Metadata schema that is required to generate IGSN landing pages. The template is also the source for the generation of DataCite metadata.

The integration of linked data vocabularies (RDF, SKOS) in the metadata is an essential step in harmonising information across different research groups and institutions and important for the implementation of the FAIR Principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) for sample descriptions. More information on these controlled vocabularies can be found in the FAIR WISH D1 List of identified linked open data vocabularies to be included in IGSN metadata (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6787200).

The template to register IGSNs for samples should ideally fit to various sample types. In a first step, we created templates for samples from surface water and vegetation from AWI polar expeditions on land (AWI Use Case) and incorporated the two other FAIR WISH use cases with core material from the Ketzin coring site (Ketzin Use Case) and for a wide range of marine biogeochemical samples (Hereon Use Case). The template comprises few mandatory and many optional variables to describe a sample, the sampling activity, location and so on. Users can easily create their Excel-template, including only the variables needed to describe a sample. A tutorial on how to use the FAIR WISH: Sample description template (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7520016) can be found in the FAIR WISH D3 Video Tutorial for the FAIR SAMPLES Template (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7381390).  As our registration template is still a work in progress, we are furthermore happy for user feedback (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7377904).

Here we will present the template and discuss its applicability for sample registration.