Managing (meta-)data across interdisciplinary research collaborationsoften involves using a variety of software tools for storage andsharing. Maintaining data accessibility and synchronization betweendifferent sites, working groups, and institutes presents a significantchallenge. We developed a solution based on the open source softwareLinkAhead that combines meta data from different repositories into asingle research data management system (RDMS). The meta data importtool was created using the extensible crawler framework provided byLinkAhead. This enables us to import meta data from four differentrepositories and ELN systems used by the Cluster of Excellence 3DMatter Made to Order (3DMM2O). Where possible, APIs of repositoriesand ELNs can be used to directly upload meta data entries fromLinkAhead (e.g., via export to DataCite XMLs). This allows(semi-)automatic workflows, such as described in the followingexample: A researcher enters meta data in an ELN These are imported into LinkAhead by the crawler (possibly enrichedby data from other sources) They can be sent directly to a repository for publication. In addition, the RDMS is built in a way that data models andcrawler definitions can also be extended and adapted to futurerequirements by the researchers at any time. Its basic functionalitycontains a graphical web-interface, as well as an API for automatedqueries which provides intuitive searching and querying and using metadata from all linked systems.
Spreckelsen et al. (Wed,) studied this question.