12. Are DaSCH's solutions consistent with international standards for metadata?
DaSCH maintains its own metadata browser at meta.dasch.swiss. In order to foster interoperability and reusability it is very important that DaSCH complies with international standards for metadata. Agreed on minimal requirements are mandatory fields in our own metadata schema, but we encourage researchers to also provide optional information.
Internal structure of the datasets
Every data set in the DaSCH Service Platform (DSP) is internally structured by the resource classes of the data model and their properties.
We encourage these classes to be derived from existing gazetteers, controlled vocabularies, ontologies or conceptual schemas such as Dublin Core, schema.org, PROV-O or the CIDOC CRM ontology.
Our database is built on linked open data standards such as RDF, RDFS, OWL and SHACL.
Multimedia files are accessible according to the IIIF standard.
Description of the datasets
Every dataset published in DSP must have a comprehensive project description, namely metadata about the dataset. The minimum requirements in this respect consist of information such as a title, abstract, keywords, discipline(s), the principal investigator, funding institution, the time period covered, how the data was collected, etc.
For this kind of metadata, we have developed our own schema similar to schema.org.
The metadata of ongoing and completed projects can be browsed at meta.dasch.swiss.
Each project can define its own ontologies (data models), which can be mapped to standard ontologies like Dublin Core or CIDOC CRM to ensure interoperability.
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13. How can I display my research data on a website?
The data archived with DaSCH can be displayed in the following ways:
You can use our all-purpose DSP-APP frontend, which allows you to access your data via a user-friendly web page, although currently you cannot configure or customize this web page.
Our database has a public API (the DSP-API) that allows you to access the data archived with DaSCH in machine-readable form. This means that you can build and maintain a website with your own financial means and technical know-how, but DaSCH does not recommend that. The public API is kept as stable as possible, but can change over time. It would fall under your responsibility to keep up with the announced changes and to implement any necessary changes in your application.
For details on how your data is displayed directly on the platform, see our Data Visualization & Display FAQ.
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14. Can I edit my data after archiving?
Yes. In DSP-APP, you can manually view, delete or edit records, although these actions are restricted by the rules of the data model and the data that is already in the database. For example, if you have configured a field as mandatory, you cannot simply delete a value for that field in a record, but you may update the value.
Your data is versioned — older states of a resource can be accessed via a timestamp in the ARK identifier, so previous versions are never lost.
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15. How do I access and search datasets archived with DaSCH?
The datasets are listed and described at https://meta.dasch.swiss. If you have found an interesting dataset, follow the link to the data. You can then conduct a simple search via the search bar, or an advanced search that filters out resources and properties that meet the search criteria.
The data is also accessible via DSP-API, which allows computer scientists to collect data in an automated way.
The search supports operators such as AND, OR, and NOT, and the advanced search allows you to build custom queries by combining specific properties and resource types.
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16. How can I reuse datasets from DaSCH for a new purpose?
Thanks to the elaborated search functionality, you can filter existing datasets according to specific criteria, which allows you to find exactly what you need. Searches are reproducible, and every resource has a stable identifier (ARK) that can be cited. All archived files can be downloaded.
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