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.

Solving Real Problems

CEDAR’s inclusion directly addresses long-standing limitations in Dataverse, such as the difficulty of managing TSV-based metadata blocks and the lack of file-level metadata authoring. With CEDAR, researchers and metadata administrators now have a more flexible, visual, and FAIR-compliant way to design and reuse schemas.

The platform also integrates with ARP’s custom RO-Crate Manager (AROMA) and search interface, ensuring that both dataset- and file-level metadata—authored via CEDAR—are discoverable and standards-aligned.

Open, Extensible, and Customized

The Hungarian team has forked and lightly customized CEDAR’s front end and deployment for their national platform needs. They’ve also implemented an API key mechanism that enables seamless authentication between Dataverse and CEDAR, streamlining cross-system workflows.

Learn More

The ARP project illustrates how CEDAR can be used to anchor a federated, ontology-aware metadata ecosystem for national-scale research data infrastructures. Explore the ARP platform at researchdata.hu and watch the demo at youtu.be/o_ENdITtIQg .