Towards a better representation of research objects in interdisciplinary research

Abstract

The Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activity. Image Space Material” (MoA) is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under Germany's Excellence Strategy from 2019 to 2025 (https://www.matters-of-activity.de/en/). Our research organization spans 40 disciplines investigating active material from several angles in interdisciplinary project setups. These include the natural sciences, humanities, medicine, design disciplines, informatics, and external industry partners. It’s easy to see that architects have other output needs than surgeons, art historians, or computer scientists. A robot arm for surgery requires different metadata than an exhibition about bio-inspired materials or 3D models of wooden structures. It is also important to cover research software output next to research data publications.

Embracing more diverse research output aligns with the current development of research results recognition, see for example Katerbow et al (2018), Jay et al (2021), European Commission (2021), and DORA resources (https://sfdora.org/resource-library/). We are aware of active development (at CERIF and KDSF) regarding the inclusion of extended metadata to reflect the diversity of today’s research output. In our contribution, we present MoA CRIS, an improved setup tailored towards interdisciplinary projects with an extended metadata schema. We are looking forward to comparing our system and metadata schema with new developments.