Extending the ICAT Metadata Catalogue to New Scientific Use Cases

The ICAT metadata catalogue is a flexible solution for managing scientific metadata and data from a wide variety of domains following the FAIR data principles. This paper will present an update of recent developments of the ICAT metadata catalogue and the latest status of the ICAT collaboration. ICAT was originally developed by UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to manage the scientific data of ISIS Neutron and Muon Source and Diamond Light Source. They have since been joined by a number of other institutes including ESRF, HZB, SESAME, and ALBA who together now form the ICAT Collaboration [1]. ICAT has been used to manage petabytes of scientific data for ISIS, DLS, ESRF, HZB, and in the future SESAME and ALBA and make these data FAIR. The latest version of the ICAT core as well as the new user interfaces, DataGateway and DataHub, and extensions to ICAT for implementing free text searching, a common search interface across Photon and Neutron catalogues, a protocol-based interface that allows making the metadata available for findability, electronic logbooks, sample tracking, and web-based data and domain specific viewers developed by the community will be presented. Finally recent developments to use ICAT to develop applications for processed data with rich metadata in the fields of small angle scattering, macromolecular crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy will be described. [1] https://icatproject.org