Mappings and crosswalks are essential elements to achieve semantic interoperability within and across domains. During the last International Data Week, two dedicated sessions were organised, presenting several existing efforts on mappings which included, two EU-funded projects, FAIR IMPACT and FAIRCORE4EOSC aiming to build a framework for making the mappings FAIR, the EOSC Association Task Force on Semantic Interoperability and also several community driven initiatives including RDA Interest and Working Groups. 

A major outcome of these sessions was the agreement to create a dedicated, cross-cutting RDA Working Group on FAIR Mapping which will be driven by FAIR-IMPACT and FAIRCORE4EOSC. The main mandate of this Working Group is to provide a more standardised and FAIR way of working with and sharing/publishing mappings and crosswalks across different communities. 

Following these initial discussions, the Working Group has been set up with the support of the RDA TIGER project. This BoF session aims at presenting an update on background information and motivation for forming the Working Group, as well as the Case Statement and the work plan, inviting feedback on the Case Statement, and encouraging commitment from attendees to join the WG and contribute to activities.

• Where do we start? Overview of the previous BoF and relevant outputs (35 minutes)

  • Short introduction – summary of the RDA P21 BoF (Yann Le Franc, 5 minutes)

  • Presentation of ongoing work in FAIR-IMPACT and FAIRCORE4EOSC (Yann Le Franc, e-Science Data Factory, Joonas Kesäniemi, CSC – 15 minutes)

  • International and RDA internal relevance of WG’s intended outputs (speaker tbc – 15 minutes)

• Where would we like to go? Presentation of the current status of the case statement and Work Plan (Yann Le Franc – 20 minutes)

• Interactive session (35 minutes interactive group activity)

  • Collecting further community feedback on WG case statement and Work Plan

  • Collecting additional use-case ideas from participants

During the International Data Week, we organised two sessions focused on mappings, one generic session to present and collect feedback on the ongoing work of FAIR-IMPACT and FAIRCORE4EOSC and a RDA P21 Birds of a Feather session, to discuss the possibility of creating a mapping WG which will join the efforts of FAIR-IMPACT and FAIRCORE4EOSC with the ongoing activities of different RDA Interests and Working Groups. This Working Group would be transversal to the other RDA activities. This proposition has been validated by the involved communities with some initial commitments. Based on this consensus, the Working Group has been built with the support of the RDA TIGER project. 

As part of the preparation for the RDA P21 BoF we collected mapping use cases from participants. These use cases were presented in the BoF and they have been used as basis for the initial version of the  “Mapping Use Case Knowledge Base” that will be presented as part of the proposed new BoF. 

Let’s talk about FAIR mappings! Towards common practices for sharing mappings and crosswalks | RDA 

Presentation from SciDataCon 2023