The Research Documentation Centre (RDC) at the ELTE Centre for Social Sciences (Budapest, Hungary) has participated with two talks at the 20th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC) in Zagreb. The conference brought together research data stewards and research data infrastructure experts from around the globe. Among other topics, participants discussed solutions to and challenges of using AI in data curation. The discussions and presentations highlighted the crucial role of research data in democratic societies and showed how the core values of open science and evidence-based policymaking can be undermined when data and documentation are not properly maintained and are at risk of being lost.

The presentation "Standardization Vs. Preservation: Supporting Interoperability by Enhancing Thematic Metadata at Social Science Archives" by RDC’s Roza Vajda, Judit Gárdos and Timea Venczel addressed the challenges of data standardization and interoperability in social science research. Drawing on research conducted in the EU-funded research ONTOLISST, the paper analyzed thematic research data documentation and metadata received from repositories, as well as extensive interviews with data management experts and addressed some key challenges and potential solutions in developing a concise, user-friendly, and interoperable thematic thesaurus for the social sciences.

The presentation is available here.