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Group Session November 21, 2025

The Evolving Landscape of Data Discovery: Practices, AI, and Beyond

Plenary: RDA 26th Plenary Meeting (VP26)

Submitted by
Mingfang Wu
Recording

Meeting objectives

Collaborative session notes:

Open session notes

Drawing on the IG’s achievements to date, and in light of the expanding role of AI in advancing search technologies and metadata, the session will aim to identify both the emerging challenges and future directions in data discovery that AI is positioned to address.

Meeting presenters

Brigitte Mathiak, Fotis E. Psomopoulos, Uwe Schindler, Mingfang Wu, Amir Aryani, Ying-Hsang Liu

Meeting agenda

  • Introduction of the group and the session (10 minutes)
  • Two lighting presentations, topics include: (15 mins each including Q/A)
    • New front tier data discovery technologies
    • Report on a survey about AI adoption in metadata practices from diverse global and regional perspectives
  • Group discussion on the following questions: (45 minutes, using google doc to ensure sufficient interactions)
    • Have you tried or plan to use knowledge graph and/or AI to enhance data discovery from your repository discovery platform?
    • How to make metadata/data ready for AI?
    • What are discovery challenges your organisations/repositories/catalogue/researchers/etc. facing?
    • What are AI activities that you have tried or could use in the context of data discovery?
  • Wrap up (5 mins)

Target audience

  • Researchers who conduct user studies for understanding more about an individual’s data discovery process
  • Data managers/providers who are responsible in describing data and making data findable
  • Data managers to investigate whether any user studies or evaluation method could be applied to their data repository/catalogue
  • Attendees with some prior preparation or insights for their institutional / personal data discovery approaches would benefit more during the group discussion parts of the session.

Group Activities and Scope

The objective of this IG is to provide a forum where representatives from across the spectrum of stakeholders and roles pertaining to data discovery can work together to identify, study and make recommendations concerning issues related to improving data discovery. The goal is to produce concrete deliverables that will be recognised and valued by the research and data communities.

Additional links to informative material

Group home page

The group has delivered the following four supporting outputs:

Slides/collaborative notes from previous plenary sessions:

  • April 2020 – RDA Virtual Plenary 15:
    • Inferring data searchers’ intent and their interaction with data discovery systems (group session)
    • Data Granularity BoF; user perspectives, data citation and data versioning (BoF session)
  • Oct. 2019 (P14) – Data Discovery Paradigms IG: Reports from Task Forces and Way Ahead (slides)
  • April 2019 (P13): Data Discovery Paradigms IG: Reports from Task Forces and Way Ahead (slides)
  • Oct. 2018 – RDA Plenary 12; IG meets, Task Forces report back (slides)
  • March 2018 — RDA Plenary 11; IG meets, Task Forces report back (slides)

Short Group Status

This group was officially endorsed at RDA P9. Since then, the group has worked on the following task forces, namely:

  1. Data/Metadata granularity (This task force spun off as a WG “data granularity WG”, which is a historical group now)
  2. Using schema.org for research dataset discovery (This task force spun off to the Research Metadata Schemas Working Group, which was endorsed in Sept. 2019, completed in 2023, now is a historical group).
  3. Other task forces from the group:
    1. Relevancy ranking (completed)
    2. Use cases, prototyping tools and test collections (completed)
    3. Best practice for making data findable (completed)
    4. Metadata enrichment (closed)
    5. User study of data discovery context and search behaviour (in progress), which delivered the supporting output “Ten principles to improve dataset discoverability” in autumn 2024

Applicable Pathways

Data Infrastructures and Environments - Generalist
AI meets data: exploring use cases, applications and innovation

Avoid conflict with the following groups

Complex Citations Working Group
Data Versioning IG

Please indicate at least (3) three breakout slots that would suit your meeting.

Breakout 3. Tuesday, 17 March, 07:00-08:30 UTC
Breakout 6. Wednesday, 18 March, 07:00-08:30 UTC
Breakout 9. Thursday, 19 March, 07:00-08:30 UTC