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Group Session June 5, 2023

FAIR Digital Object Fabric: Shaping the Fabric

Plenary: RDA 21st Plenary Meeting [part of International Data Week 2023], Salzburg, Austria

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Meeting objectives

 

 

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FAIR Digital Objects (FAIR DOs) describe a concept of virtual data objects that has been developed and used by RDA in various Working and Interest Groups. FAIR DOs may represent data, software, or other research resources. They are uniquely identified by a Persistent Identifier (PID) and metadata rich enough to enable them to be reliably found, used and cited. 

FAIR DOs are currently discussed world-wide, in many RDA groups, in the European Open Science Cloud, the FDO Forum https://fairdo.org, as well as in other initiatives with the need to design and develop large integrative research data infrastructures to facilitate findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability (FAIR).

In this session we would like to discuss required components of the fabric building a landscape of services and tools. How does the Fabric look like including components, interfaces, protocols, workflows, etc.?

 

Meeting presenters

Andreas Pfeil, Maggie Hellström, Rob Quick, Xin Chen, Rainer Stotzka, …

Meeting agenda

  • Introduction to IG FAIR Digital Object Fabric [Xin Chen15 min]

  • Presentations  about services, tools and use cases – which fabric components are necessary? [15 minutes each, including discussions]

    • Liu Jia: CSTR tools on data workflow tracibility  

    • Andreas Pfeil: A conceptual model for a FAIR DO fabric

    • Sirieam Hunke, Marius Politze:  Lessons Learned from Implementing FDOs in the Coscine RDM Platform – A view on FDOs Beyond Singular Files

  • Discussions [25 min]

  • Wrap up [5 min]

Target audience

  • newcomers who want to sneak in and to learn something and

  • our reliable RDM and FAIR DO veterans

Additional links to informative material

European Commission (2018b). Turning FAIR into reality. Final report and action plan from the European Commission expert group on FAIR data. Luxembourg: European Commission. https://doi.org/10.2777/1524

RDA DFT Group: DFT Core Terms and Model; http://hdl.handle.net/11304/5d760a3e-991d-11e5-9bb4-2b0aad496318 

RDA DTR Group: Data Type Registry; https://www.rd-alliance.org/group/data-type-registries-wg/outcomes/data-…

RDA PID Kernel Information Working Group: Recommendation on PID Kernel Information; https://www.rd-alliance.org/group/pid-kernel-information-wg/outcomes/rec…

RDA FAIR4ML Group: Call Minutes; https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Af3KE-i7aXkMw_pYmAlTVLZnS97ruduo7zR7jVzIr98/edit#heading=h.dz7qsqzd88qu

 

IG FAIR DO Fabric:

https://www.rd-alliance.org/group/FAIR-digital-object-fabric-ig.html 

https://www.rd-alliance.org/group/data-fabric-ig/wiki/rda-ig-data-fabric-fair-digital-objects 

Collection of information about FAIR Digital Objects:  

FAIR DO Publications (https://www.zotero.org/groups/2517421/fair_digital_objects/collections/E5CWSWB3 )

FAIR DO: RDA Recommendations & Outputs (https://www.zotero.org/groups/2517421/fair_digital_objects/collections/K2LCLTIU)

Project shares:

https://www.rd-alliance.org/group/data-fabric-ig/wiki/monthly-meetings

 

Short Group Status

The FAIR Digital Object Fabric IG identified that working with large volumes of data in the many scientific labs and most probably also in other areas such as industry and governance is highly inefficient and too costly. Scientists working on data-intensive research tasks are forced to spend about 75% of their time to manage, find, combine and curate data – a real waste of time and capacity. The FAIR DO Fabric is therefore looking at the components of the data creation and consumption cycle to identify opportunities to optimize the work with data, to place current RDA activities in the overall landscape, to look at what other communities are doing in this area, and to foster testing and adoption of RDA outputs. The goal of FAIR DO Fabric finally is to identify common components and define their characteristics and services that can be used across boundaries in such a way that they can be combined to solve a variety of data scenarios such as replicating data in federations, developing virtual research environments, and automating regular data management tasks. Much important work is being done on data publishing and citation, but FAIR DO Fabric believes that we need to start at early moments in the “Data Fabrics” in the labs to organize, document, and manage data professionally if we want to meet the requirements of the coming decades.

However, until now the discussions around the FDO concept and the development of technical implementation frameworks has been dominated by data management experts and large research data producing organisations. To progress further, and build a strong community that can support the adoption of FDOs in daily practice, we must reach out to academic researchers and bring their views and concerns into the discussion. 

 

Applicable Pathways

FAIR, CARE, TRUST - Evaluation and Policy
FAIR, CARE, TRUST - Adoption, Implementation, and Deployment
Data Infrastructures and Environments - Generalist

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