MEDFORD in a Box: Improvements and Future Directions for a Metadata Description Language

TL;DR

This paper introduces MEDFORD-in-a-Box (MIAB), an enhanced ecosystem for the MEDFORD metadata language, aimed at improving usability, validation, and data transport to promote better research reproducibility.

Contribution

The paper presents MIAB, a comprehensive update to MEDFORD with improved validation, export capabilities, and a visual IDE to facilitate metadata creation for researchers.

Findings

Enhanced validation routines in MEDFORD parser

BagIt export capability added for data transport

Improved VS Code extension with visual IDE

Abstract

Scientific research metadata is vital to ensure the validity, reusability, and cost-effectiveness of research efforts. The MEDFORD metadata language was previously introduced to simplify the process of writing and maintaining metadata for non-programmers. However, barriers to entry and usability remain, including limited automatic validation, difficulty of data transport, and user unfamiliarity with text file editing. To address these issues, we introduce MEDFORD-in-a-Box (MIAB), a documentation ecosystem to facilitate researcher adoption and earlier metadata capture. MIAB contains many improvements, including an updated MEDFORD parser with expanded validation routines and BagIt export capability. MIAB also includes an improved VS Code extension that supports these changes through a visual IDE. By simplifying metadata generation, this new tool supports the creation of correct, consistent, and reusable metadata, ultimately improving research reproducibility.