PIDfest 26

What happens to research context when data gets published? Too often, the rich metadata from active research—protocols, collaborators, instruments, but also funding —gets "lost in translation" between lab notebooks and data repositories. Research Activity Identifiers (RAiDs) offer a way to keep that connection alive.

This session presents learnings from the US RAiD pilot program, bringing together two complementary perspectives: ResearchSpace, developers of the RSpace research data management platform, and the University of Texas at Austin's Texas Data Repository. Together, they explore how RAiD can thread through the research lifecycle—from active research documentation to data publication—creating durable, machine-readable connections in the PID graph.

You'll hear about integration patterns, metadata strategies for bi-directional linking, and practical approaches that minimize researcher burden while maximizing the metadata value of your repository deposits.

Messy, inconsistent metadata is one of the biggest blockers to data interoperability— and it usually happens because metadata is an afterthought, often added long after the data was created. In this session, you'll see how PID4NFDI, TS4NFDI, and the RSpace research data management platform establish a practical interoperability layer that puts interoperable metadata right at the point of data creation. Using embedded terminology widgets and cross-schema mappings, researchers can capture DataCite-aligned metadata without ever leaving their lab notebook. The result: cleaner data, less manual clean-up, a reusable model that can extend to other tools and services, and ultimately data and PIDs with metadata that can easily be transformed into other formats.