We are pleased to announce the release of EUDAT B2FIND 2.4, a new version of the cross-disciplinary metadata catalogue B2FIND (b2find.eudat.eu). This version includes new design of the graphical user interface, improvements of search performance, enhancement of harvesting and mapping functionalities and extension of the meta data schema by elements like <relatedIdentifier> and <Contributor>. B2FIND now also represents metadata records from PANGAEA.
B2FIND is a discovery service for research data distributed over memory areas within EOSC-hub and beyond. It is a basic service of the pan-european infrastructure EUDAT CDI and will become the central indexing tool for EOSC-hub. For this we built up a comprehensive joint metadata catalogue that spans a wide spread scope of scientific outcome - from Climate Research to Social Science and Particle Physics to Economics. Therefore different metadata formats, schemas and standards are homogenised on the B2FIND metadata schema, allowing users to search and find research data across scientific disciplines and research areas - thus enabling an interdisciplinary perspective.
B2FIND provides powerful search functionalities: metadata records can be found with a freetext-search, results may be narrowed down using different facets (e.g. geospatial or timeline search). Referencing data identifiers will either link to a landing page or to the data itself.
B2FIND also acts as a data curator, endorsing data providers in the creation, dissemination and quality assurance of their metadata. In addition B2FIND offers detailed training material (https://github.com/EUDAT-Training/B2FIND-Training) that guides interested parties through the entire life cycle of metadata, thus being a supporting service for research communities concerning technical and content related issues.
Further information can be found here: https://eudat.eu/services/b2find, for Data Providers we refer to our Guidelines (http://b2find.eudat.eu/guidelines/introduction.html). B2FIND is an open source project, everyone is free to use the source code: https://github.com/EUDAT-B2FIND.
