FAIRCORE4EOSC and Switch sign a Letter of Intent, Marking the Second Collaboration Agreement in Metadata Schema and Crosswalk Registry adoption

European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) project, FAIRCORE4EOSC, and Switch Data & Insights signed a Letter of Intent (LoI) in December 2023 to support the collaboration between the project participants in adopting and operationalising the Metadata Schema and Crosswalk Registry (MSCR). The signatories of the LoI do not represent the consortium of these two projects nor their coordinating organisations but rather their Project Management Offices (PMO).

FAIRCORE4EOSC and Switch are both working actively in the field of FAIR data and metadata on research outputs. FAIRCORE4EOSC delivers nine new EOSC-Core components in support of a Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable (FAIR) research life-cycle. MSCR is one of these technical components that will be crafted during the project lifetime (2021–2025). It can be used to create crosswalks between differing metadata schemas to bridge over the differences and allow eventual conversion of metadata between differing schemas.

Switch is the Swiss National Research and Education Network (NREN) that provides essential digital services to the education, research and innovation community in Switzerland. The NREN is building an ecosystem for linked open research data in the framework of the “Connectome Project”, which will increase the findability, interoperability, and reusability of open data and its impact on scholarly research and citizen science.

The purpose of the LoI is to highlight the intention of the parties to establish a relationship in order to cooperate in a range of areas and to work together for mutual benefit. Switch will for example use MSCR to register their input and output schemas and explore automation possibilities.

"In the context of our future collaboration, we expect to be able to generate mappings (semi-)automatically for nationally relevant knowledge graph creations from the MSCR”, says Kurt Baumann Infrastructure & Data Engineer from the Data & Insights team at Switch

Enhancing collaboration between different projects through Letters of Intent is not a new practice for FAIRCORE4EOSC. In May 2023, PMOs of FAIRCORE4EOSC and BioDT (Biodiversity Digital Twin for Advanced Modelling, Simulation and Prediction Capabilities) signed the first LoI, marking the start for enhanced cooperation between the project partners. The LoI between FAIRCORE4EOSC and BioDT highlights the intent of partners to collaborate, especially in utilising the MSCR service in the BioDT.

“The collaboration with FC4E has been beneficial for the BioDT on multiple levels but particularly in regard to the adoption of the Metadata Schema and Crosswalk Registry (MSCR) developed by FAIRCORE4EOSC. BioDT is leveraging the MSCR to create crosswalks between Data Catalogue Vocabulary (DCAT) 3.0 and Ecological Metadata language schema (EML), facilitating the exchange of metadata between diverse catalogues of biodiversity data. Additionally, the collaboration enables a joint exploration and sharing of expertise between BioDT and FAIRCORE4EOSC on common challenges related to data quality, workflows, interoperability but also community-level challenges, engagement and training."  say Jesse Harrison, BioDT Project Coordinator and Hanna Koivula, Senior RDM Specialist

Are you interested in testing the Metadata Schema and Crosswalk Registry or any other of the new EOSC components that FAIRCORE4EOSC is developing?  Sign up to get access to provide feedback to the development teams!