Consider an extensible metadata model? about bowerbird HOT 4 OPEN

The original motivation for BB was for mirroring external data sets that generally already have a full metadata record elsewhere. BB's minimal metadata was intended to be enough to trigger users to know where the data actually came from and cite it if appropriate, and link them to documentation (that full MD record).
So while I'm not at all averse to a richer metadata framework within BB, I'm not sure that manually duplicating already-existing metadata information is ideal. I wonder how practicable it would be to auto-fill some bowerbird metadata from an existing record? e.g.

my_source_skeleton <- bb_src_from_eml(url_to_eml_record)
## or
my_source_skeleton <- bb_src_from_iso(url_to_iso19115_record)

to give a user a skeleton record from an EML/ISO/DIF/whatever record, which they then edit as appropriate? (And accommodate some extra optional fields within that, too.)

from bowerbird.

Yeah, that makes sense. I could still imagine that it might be useful for a user to add their own keyword or tags, e.g. to associate data with a project etc, but of course there's other places they could record that.

Yeah, an automated import of the minimal data might make sense (e.g. datacite API will generate a citation for anything with a DOI) but probably involves supporting too many different formats, so I'm happy to close this as out of scope but your call.

from bowerbird.

Chipping away at this - I have implemented a 'source generator' function for Zenodo data sets (bb_zenodo_source). Given the Zenodo identifier of a data set, it will pull what it needs from the data descriptor and generate the (pretty much complete) bb_source object. Also a similar function to handle Australian Antarctic Data Centre data sets. I had hoped (per commments above) that something like that might even be possible for general EML or DIF metadata records, but have decided that this is probably impractical. Or at least more effort than I can manage for the time being.

from bowerbird.

👏 very cool! I think having even one of these is a nice proof of concept. A user who commonly accesses data through a specific platform could then more easily template off your example at least. And given the ease of depositing data in Zenodo it seems like a good one to start with. nice work!

from bowerbird.