One of the festival’s themes is persistence through sustainability. With MERIL, our goal is to achieve sustainability through persistence.
MERIL is the largest metadata repository for European
research infrastructures (RIs). The last phase of the project yielded a trove of metadata, but identifiers—whether persistent or not—were not part of the cataloguing efforts, so the data cannot be remixed in research graphs like FREYA’s. We need PIDs for RIs, and we need to reuse existing PIDs to better describe scholarly entities other than RIs that are referenced in MERIL's metadata records. RIs are one of the lesser-known entities in the scholarly web, and we want to change that.
Unfortunately, work on MERIL was suspended indefinitely in late 2019. MERIL is the only database of its kind, and we believe it deserves both technical and financial support from European stakeholders. We will first briefly present the existing repository—post mortems are always fun, aren't they?—and then move to a discussion of our ideas to revive the project. Join us to discuss the future of MERIL and European RIs!
