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Landing page metadata

To make the metadata as machine-readable as possible, the metadata should be exposed in a structured format like schema.org JSON-LD, which is a widely used standard for representing structured data on the web. This allows search engines and other applications to easily understand and index the metadata, improving discoverability and accessibility.
There is also some additional ways to provide the metadata on the landing page using HTML meta tags and HTTP headers.

HTML meta tags

The metadata can be included in the HTML of the landing page using meta and link tags. This is a common practice for search engine optimization (SEO) and can help improve the visibility of the dataset in search results.

Example

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <meta name="description" content="The description of the dataset">
        <meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3">
        <meta name="citation_title" content="Swedish political party programs and election manifestos">
        <meta name="citation_publisher" content="University of Gothenburg">
        <meta name="citation_publication_date" content="2024-05-30T14:25:55.848643Z">
        <meta name="citation_doi" content="10.5878/kcsf-k293">
        <link rel="type" href="https://schema.org/Dataset">
        <link rel="type" href="https://schema.org/AboutPage">
        <link rel="cite-as" href="https://doi.org/10.5878/kcsf-k293">
        <link rel="author" href="https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7365-0691">
        <link rel="describedby" type="application/ld+json" href="https://example.com/dataset/1/export/json_ld">
        <link rel="describedby" type="application/rdf+xml" href="https://example.com/dataset/1/export/dcat">
        <link rel="describedby" type="application/vnd.datacite.datacite+xml" href="https://example.com/dataset/1/export/datacite">
        <link rel="describedby" type="application/vnd.citationstyles.csl+json" href="https://example.com/dataset/1/export/csl">
        <link rel="item" href="https://example.com/dataset/1/files/data.csv">
        <link rel="item" href="https://example.com/dataset/1/files/readme.txt">
        <link rel="license" href="https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/">
        <script type="application/ld+json">{ ... }</script>
    </head>
    <body>
        ...
    </body>
</html>
A list of the basic set of meta links can be found here https://signposting.org/FAIR/#level1

HTTP headers

The metadata links can also be included in the HTTP headers of the landing page. This is a less common practice but can be useful for certain applications or services that rely on HTTP headers for metadata.
This makes allows applications to discover the metadata without having to parse the HTML of the landing page.

Example

curl --head https://researchdata.se/en/catalogue/dataset/2024-640

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
server: nginx/1.27.4
date: Wed, 07 May 2025 07:43:13 GMT
content-type: text/html;charset=utf-8
link: <https://schema.org/Dataset>; rel="type", <https://schema.org/AboutPage>; rel="type", <https://researchdata.se/catalogue/dataset/2024-640/1/export/json_ld>; rel="describedby"; type="application/ld+json", <https://researchdata.se/catalogue/dataset/2024-640/1/export/dcat>; rel="describedby"; type="application/rdf+xml", <https://researchdata.se/catalogue/dataset/2024-640/1/export/datacite>; rel="describedby"; type="application/vnd.datacite.datacite+xml", <https://researchdata.se/catalogue/dataset/2024-640/1/export/csl>; rel="describedby"; type="application/vnd.citationstyles.csl+json", <https://orcid.org/0009-0007-2583-780X>; rel="author", <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5544-7147>; rel="author", <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>; rel="license", <https://doi.org/10.5878/1yx0-hx90>; rel="cite-as"

References