Image by Pete

A core part of Dryad’s mission is to make our data available as widely as possible. Although most users find Dryad content through our website or via links from journal articles, many users also find Dryad content through search aggregators and other third-party services. For our content to be available to these external services, we follow the FAIR principle of Interoperability and make metadata available through a number of machine-readable mechanisms, including OAI-PMH, the DataONE API, and RSS.

This year, we added support for a new machine-readable mechanism, the Schema.org metadata format. This format was originally developed by representatives of major search engines, including Google, Bing, and Yahoo. It has recently been endorsed by a number of data repositories, including Dryad. The Schema.org metadata format allows us to embed machine-readable descriptions of data directly into the same web pages that users use to view Dryad content.

For example, for this recently deposited data package, you can visit the web page to view information optimized for human users. But if you use your web browser’s option to “view source” on the page, you will find the following metadata embedded in the Schema.org format:

{
    "@context" : "http://schema.org/",
    "@type" : "Dataset",
    "@id" : "https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.70d46",
    "name" : "Data from: Biodiverse cities: the nursery industry, 
    homeowners, and neighborhood differences drive urban tree
    composition",
    "author" : [ {
        "@type" : "Person",
        "@id" : "http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2649-9159",
        "givenName" : "Meghan",
        "familyName" : "Avolio"
    }, {
        "@type" : "Person",
        "@id" : "http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7209-514X",
        "givenName" : "Diane",
        "familyName" : "Pataki"
    }, {
        "@type" : "Person",
        "@id" : "http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5215-4947",
        "givenName" : "Tara",
        "familyName" : "Trammell"
    }, {
        "@type" : "Person",
        "givenName" : "Joanna",
        "familyName" : "Endter-Wada"
    } ],
    "datePublished" : "2017-12-18",
    "description" : "In arid and semi-arid regions, where few if any 
    trees are native, city trees are largely human-planted. Societal 
    factors such as resident preferences for tree traits, nursery 
    offerings, and neighborhood characteristics are potentially key 
    drivers of urban tree community composition and diversity....",
    "keywords" : [ "urban tree diversity" ],
    "citation" : {
        "@type" : "Article",
        "identifier" : "doi:10.1002/ecm.1290"},
    "publisher" : {
        "@type" : "Organization",
        "name" : "Dryad Digital Repository",
        "url" : "https://datadryad.org"}
}

The Schema.org metadata is available for any search engines or other interested users to collect and use. Last week, we saw the first major use of this metadata, with the launch of the Google Dataset Search service. Although Google Dataset Search is still in beta, the initial version is promising. It is easy to search and find content from Dryad and other data repositories all within a single system.

We are proud to make Dryad content available through the Dataset Search, and we look forward to other organizations making use of our data in new and exciting ways!