This report aims to help DCC and the FAIRsFAIR project consider optons for creating a minimal metadata schema that may be used on a trial basis in their work to establish a shared catalogue in collaboraton with various providers of training materials.

In November 2020 DCC sought expert advice to inform a draft proposal for trial exchange of metadata between the FAIRsFAIR project and catalogues provided by related projects. These projects have shared interests in providing seamless discovery of learning resources across a number of catalogues that are currently provided by diferent communites involved in establishing the European Open Science Cloud. EOSC projects and other training providers have a common interest in making training materials FAIR, especially where these relate to training about enabling FAIR principles to be implemented in research practice. The focus of the report is on optons for deploying standards established for OER (Open Educatonal Resources).

The OER standards may be used to make training materials more findable, by enabling training providers and cataloguers to use community-agreed discipline-agnostc terms in the metadata they use to annotate these training materials, so that catalogue users have more standardised ways to find and potentally reuse them. This is in pursuit of a recognised need to fill gaps in training capacity, expanding the availability of resources that may be used to by research communites, data stewards, and others who support research, in learning how to produce more FAIR data.

The advice sought by DCC was provided by Phil Barker of CETIS LLP, and follows below as an informal (unscheduled) report from FAIRsFAIR to inform its tasks 3.3. (Embedding FAIR data practce in research culture) and 6.3 (knowledge bases for competence centres).

The report briefy reviews abstract models for data about training materials, and the specifcaton of their semantc aspects as standard schemas. Considering the potental of applicaton profles to specify terms drawn from diferent standards in order to facilitate their exchange between catalogues, the report characterizes the various relevant specifcatons and schema. The report then suggests an approach to harmonizaton, frst through establishing a minimal metadata applicaton profle, and then by setng up a metadata store that would exploit linked data standards to make this metadata available in machine-actionable form.