Public registries, such as the O2A Registry, Sensor Management System (SMS), Persistent IDentification of INSTruments (PIDINST) and others, are increasingly used by the scientific community to store and provide sensor metadata in a FAIR manner. Applications developed to support sensor management operations need to aggregate sensors registered in different registries. However, each registry has a unique API and outputs data in different formats, making cross-registry integration challenging. Currently, there is no standardized approach for aggregating and integrating metadata from multiple registries in applications that manage sensors across different platforms. As part of the MOIN4Herbie project under HMC, Herbie — a digital lab notebook used for digitizing provenance of scientific data - is being further extended to digitize the storage of sensor maintenance metadata. To achieve this, ontologies were first developed for the sensor maintenance use case. These were then implemented using the Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) to collect and validate metadata from users as Resource Description Framework (RDF) graphs. To facilitate metadata integration from registries into Herbie, the Registry2RDF module has been developed to transform registry data from the O2A Registry into RDF graphs. To enhance interoperability, this module will be further extended to support a unified SHACL shape, enabling data collection from multiple registries. It could serve as the missing standardized approach for integrating metadata into other applications. With this contribution, we aim to initiate a discussion on how to generalize our approach for broader applicability in other projects.MOIN4Herbie is funded 2024-2026 by the Initiative and Networking Fund of the Helmholtz Association (Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration HMC, Project Cohort 2023).
Rambhia et al. (Tue,) studied this question.