FAIR Data Fund use case: Defining a domain-relevant community metadata standard for drone data and a tool to format it

We talk with Flo­ri­an J. Ell­säßer, Alice Nikuze and Sofia Tilon (Uni­ver­si­ty of Twente)

What is your project about?

In this project, we aim to estab­lish a domain-spe­cif­ic meta­da­ta stan­dard for Uncrewed Aer­i­al Vehi­cles (UAV) datasets, com­mon­ly referred to as drones. We also intend to devel­op a UAV meta­da­ta man­age­ment plat­form to help cre­ate stan­dard­ized meta­da­ta. These datasets typ­i­cal­ly con­sist of image files with rich EXIF data and ref­er­ence data in tab­u­lar for­mats.

The datasets have ver­sa­tile appli­ca­tions, such as study­ing cli­mate change impacts in agri­cul­ture and forestry, dis­as­ter risks, and geo-health. Mak­ing these datasets FAIR is cru­cial to facil­i­tate their uti­liza­tion in address­ing var­i­ous glob­al chal­lenges, enhanc­ing data acces­si­bil­i­ty and reusabil­i­ty for research and deci­sion-mak­ing.

What are some results that you can share with us?

Dur­ing the project, we reviewed all drone/UAV data sets on 4 data bases and col­lect­ed and ana­lyzed the meta­da­ta and if and how it was described, stored and made avail­able. From that we gen­er­at­ed a draft for a meta­da­ta stan­dard. We shared this draft with the 4TU.ResearchData tech­ni­cal staff to dis­cuss options for a user cen­tered data input tool. 

Based on these dis­cus­sions, we had our draft for a meta­da­ta stan­dard reviewed by sev­er­al col­leagues and it will be final­ly reviewed by a group of peo­ple inter­est­ed in open data to col­lect more feed­back. We are cur­rent­ly also writ­ing a small man­u­script on the process and meta­da­ta stan­dard and we hope that we can con­tin­ue work­ing on the data input tool. 

How is the FAIR Data Fund help­ing you with your project?

The FAIR Data Fund helped us to be able to ded­i­cate a few hours every month to work on the UAV data meta­da­ta stan­dard. It fur­ther helped us to con­tact and col­lab­o­rate with very dif­fer­ent peo­ple on the small project and to con­nect to the local open sci­ence com­mu­ni­ty. 

Flo­ri­an J. Ell­säßer and his col­leagues at Uni­ver­si­ty of Twente are among the win­ners of the FAIR Data Fund 2023 edi­tion.