News about CEDAR

CEDAR 2.7.11 Now Live: PFAS Field Support and Embedded Editor Improvements

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We’re pleased to announce that CEDAR 2.7.11 has been successfully deployed to production. This release brings important improvements to the metadata authoring experience and introduces support for additional field types.

What’s New

PFAS Field Availability
CEDAR now supports the new PFAS (Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances) field. Template authors can incorporate PFAS-related metadata fields directly into their templates and instances, enabling richer environmental and chemical data modeling within CEDAR.

Embedded Editor as the Default
The CEDAR embedded instance editor is now the default editing experience in the Workbench. This editor offers a more integrated, streamlined approach to instance editing, improving responsiveness and simplifying the user interface.

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New: YAML Support for CEDAR Artifacts

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We’re excited to announce support for a new YAML-based representation of CEDAR metadata artifacts. YAML (YAML Ain’t Markup Language) offers a more readable, compact alternative to JSON for defining CEDAR templates, elements, fields, and instances—making it easier for users and developers to understand and edit metadata structures.

Why YAML?

CEDAR templates have traditionally been represented as JSON Schema. While powerful and expressive, JSON Schema can be verbose and difficult to read or edit manually—especially for users reviewing or writing complex metadata templates.

The new YAML format addresses this by offering:

  • Improved readability with cleaner indentation and less syntactic clutter
  • Simpler hand-editing of templates for users comfortable with structured configuration formats
  • Better version control diffs (changes in YAML are easier to interpret in Git-based workflows)
  • Easier onboarding for those new to CEDAR or metadata specification

What’s Included

The YAML representation captures the full semantics of CEDAR artifacts, including:

  • Template structure
  • Field definitions and types
  • Value constraints and cardinality
  • Ontology bindings and value sets
  • Required fields and conditional visibility
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CEDAR 2.7.7 Released: ORCID and ROR Field Support

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We’re pleased to announce that CEDAR version 2.7.7 has been deployed to production. This release introduces support for two important external authority fields—ORCID and ROR—bringing more precision and interoperability to your metadata authoring workflows.

What’s New

ORCID Field Support
You can now directly look up and validate contributor identities against the ORCID registry. When you add a person’s ORCID to your metadata, CEDAR verifies it and records a globally recognized, persistent identifier.

ROR Field Support
Similarly, the new ROR field lets you search for and reference institutions and organizations through the Research Organization Registry. This ensures that organization names in your metadata are unambiguous, standardized, and easily linked across datasets.

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CEDAR Supports Hungary’s National Research Data Repository

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CEDAR is now a central component of ARP, Hungary’s national federated research data repository platform. Developed by the HUN-REN SZTAKI Department of Distributed Systems in collaboration with the Center for Social Sciences and the Wigner Research Centre for Physics, ARP provides a robust infrastructure for publishing and managing research data across all disciplines in Hungary.

CEDAR in the ARP Stack

To meet the diverse metadata needs of Hungary’s research community, the ARP platform integrates several open tools—Dataverse, RO-Crate, and CEDAR—each playing a distinct role. Within this architecture, CEDAR serves as the Schema Registry—the authoritative source of JSON Schemas used to define and validate structured metadata across the ARP ecosystem.

Researchers use CEDAR’s drag-and-drop interface to design metadata schemas that are:

  • Installed into Dataverse as metadata blocks,
  • Used in RO-Crate to annotate file-level metadata, and
  • Referenced in ARP’s federated search infrastructure to power semantic queries.

This allows rich, ontology-backed metadata to be authored once in CEDAR and reused throughout the national data infrastructure.

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