The Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development (ZonMw) is taking concrete steps to improve the FAIRness of COVID-19 and health research data. As part of its national guidance on metadata, ZonMw highlights CEDAR as a key tool for researchers to create machine-readable, reusable metadata.

FAIR Starts with Metadata

In ZonMw’s official Guidance on Metadata (v2.0), the organization emphasizes that rich, structured metadata are essential to making data findable and reusable. To this end, ZonMw asks all funded researchers to document seven key metadata elements, ranging from persistent identifiers and data formats to controlled vocabularies and metadata schemas.

The guidance makes it clear: metadata need to be both human- and machine-readable, ideally using RDF-based formats, and aligned with community standards.

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