EUDAT announces the launch of the latest improved version of its flagship discovery service B2FIND and is now accessible at b2find.eudat.eu as of Friday 16 October 2020 at 9:00 CEST.

B2FIND´s development goes back to the beginnings of EUDAT in 2011 which was followed up by the project EUDAT 2020 and led to the development of a comprehensive metadata catalogue comprising research data from different scientific disciplines using various metadata schemas and standards.

Since the entire complex of metadata management has increased in importance and developed further in recent years, there was a growing need for enhanced modularisation of the core B2FIND ingestion code.

What started as ‘refactoring’ very soon became ‘rewriting’ the code using the chance to change the whole system. B2FIND now consists of new hardware, new ingestion code, a new software stack as well as an enhanced metadata schema.  

What’s new in B2FIND?

  • Upgraded new hardware with larger storage space for growing number of records or research communities

  • Inclusion of supplementary libraries (e.g. BeautifulSoup, Shapely) 

  • Clean, modular python-based code in the backend that enables faster and more flexible metadata integration according to research communities’ needs on several complexity levels.

  • Option to group different harvesting endpoints to one community with specific mapping for each endpoint, including reader for common standards.

  • Enhanced metadata schema based on Datacite, including now the elements ‘Size’, ‘Version’, ‘Funding Reference’ and ‘Instrument’. 

  • Reingestion of all B2FIND communities using common standards reader and additional adjusted mapfiles

Benefits

A discovery interface for research data with optimised technical requirements, amended workflows, and improved metadata standardisation provides benefits for all. Users searching for data can benefit from enhanced precision and recall, while data providers can benefit from increased visibility of their research data. 

The future is yet to come

B2FIND now represents metadata records from 33 research communities with more than 1 million curated datasets and several search options to narrow down results. But EUDAT doesn't stop there: Several communities are ‘in the pipeline’ to be integrated within the next weeks. 

Publishing the new B2FIND metada schema as EUDAT core will enable a seamless exchange of information stored in a core set of metadata elements between the EUDAT services B2FIND and B2SHARE and introducing <Instrument> as metadata element is expected to enhance the findability of research data from specific research areas. 

Where to find what