FAIRsharing is an informative and educational resource on interlinked standards (including terminologies), databases and policies, three key elements of the FAIR ecosystem. FAIRsharing is adopted by funders, publishers and communities across all research disciplines. It promotes the existence and value of these resources to aid data sharing and consequently requires a high standard of curation to ensure accurate and timely information is provided across all of our stakeholder groups. Here I discuss the methods employed and challenges faced during curation and maintenance of existing content, as well as the introduction of new features. I will cover how we store machine- and human-accessible metadata, including governance information, and the methods we use to determine what common metadata we should describe. I also will discuss the benefits of both in-house curation and community-driven curation by our stakeholder groups.

1. CC BY-SA 4.0 International
datareadiness.eng.ox.ac.uk
Allyson Lister, PhD
FAIRsharing - Content and Community Coordinator,
Senior Knowledge Engineer,
ORCiD: 0000-0002-7702-4495
@FAIRsharing_org
contact@fairsharing.org
10.25504/FAIRsharing.2abjs5
Scientific Vocabularies: needs, status, validity, governance and sustainability 22 June 2022
Curation and governance of an ecosystem of research standards
and databases

2. CC BY-SA 4.0 International
An informative and educational resource, and a service
FAIRsharing provides curated descriptions and relationship graphs of
standards, databases and policies in all disciplines
COMMUNITY STANDARDS
POLICIES
by funders, journals
and other organizations
DATABASES
including repositories
and knowledgebases
Identifiers
Terminologies Guidelines
Formats

3. CC BY-SA 4.0 International
FAIRsharing
terminologies have
breadth rather than
depth
Standards, databases
and policies, and the
connections among
them, are constantly
evolving
Common descriptions,
findability
release scheduling,
changes in imported
ontologies
Common set of attributes to
describe terminologies,
common metadata within
terminologies
Application ontologies with
pre-existing sources
The challenges we
all face
The solutions we take
come from the
community we serve
Within FAIRsharing, vocabularies are used to facilitate discoverability and
curate relationships and across resources, organisations and domains

4. CC BY-SA 4.0 International
Subjects
● Hierarchy of 436 academic
disciplines that imports a
subset of terms, annotation
and persistent identifiers
from 7 publicly-available
vocabularies.
● Used in annotating and
indexing FAIRsharing records
● Primarily manually
generated, with additional
annotation automatically
imported
https://fairsharing.org/browse/subject
https://github.com/FAIRsharing/subject-ontology
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ols/ontologies/srao
https://service.tib.eu/webvowl

5. CC BY-SA 4.0 International
Providing relevant
information across the
entire research community
is a complex challenge
requiring a strong user
community
Relationships (among
resources and within the
user community) are at the
core of FAIRsharing’s
curation approaches
https://fairsharing.org/browse/subject

6. CC BY-SA 4.0 International
Domains
● Hierarchy of 968 domains /
content descriptors that
imports a subset of terms,
annotation and persistent
identifiers from >50
publicly-available
vocabularies.
● Used in annotating and
indexing FAIRsharing records
● Primarily automatically
generated in a bottom-up
way based on user
requirements
https://github.com/FAIRsharing/domain-ontology
https://service.tib.eu/webvowl

7. CC BY-SA 4.0 International
Subjects and
domains in a
FAIRsharing record
A window with additional details
appears when hovering over a tag

8. CC BY-SA 4.0 International
URL: https://fairsharing.org/ISO20691, https://fairsharing.org/graph/3533
URL: https://committee.iso.org/standard/68848.html
Collections provide context
and connectivity

9. CC BY-SA 4.0 International
https://fairsharing.org/graph/3381
Relationships are central to
FAIRsharing, presenting both a
challenge and an opportunity.
They create a rich graph of
records, organisations
subjects/domains and users.
How best to maintain/govern
this information?

10. CC BY-SA 4.0 International
https://guidelines.openaire.eu/en/latest/data/index.html,
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/01/17/2020-00689/request-for-public-comment-on-draft-desirable-characteristics-of-repositories-for-managing-and,
https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups/data-repository-attributes-wg, Metadata Schema for the Description of Research Data Repositories, Repository Features to Help Researchers: An
invitation to a dialogue, Identifying ELIXIR Core Data Resources, Core Trust Seal, Science Europe, The TRUST Principles for digital repositories, COAR Community Framework for
Good Practices in Repositories, NIH: Selecting a Repository for Data Resulting from NIH-Supported Research, Standards, OpenDOAR Repositories and Metadata Practices, DCAT,
https://datascience.nih.gov/news/nih-office-of-data-science-strategy-announces-new-initiative-to-improve-data-access, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2012.13117,
https://rd-alliance.org/group/fair-research-software-fair4rs-wg/outcomes/fair-principles-research-software-fair4rs-0
The complexity challenge: implementing community consensus

11. CC BY-SA 4.0 International
The complexity challenge: implementing community consensus
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aab2374 and
https://www.cos.io/initiatives/top-guidelines
Published in 2015 http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-005
Published in 2020
Published in 2022
Different focus but common goals?
1. Improve clarity and efficiency
2. Increase alignment and comparability,
3. Better guidance to researchers to manage and share digital objects
Transparency and Openness Promotion

12. CC BY-SA 4.0 International
Efforts to align terminology
metadata and common
metadata about terminologies
Hua Min et al. Conference: International Conference on Biological Ontology &
BioCreative At: August 1-4, 2016, Corvallis, Oregon, USA
OBO Metadata Ontology (OMO) Workshop (slides), April 2022

13. CC BY-SA 4.0 International
Our subjects and
domains
● Completely align with OBO
Foundry Principles
● “In practice” alignment with
the “Series of Concerns”
from Cox et al. earlier in this
session
https://www.scidatacon.org/IDW-2022/sessions/461/paper/1049/
https://obofoundry.org/principles/fp-000-summary.html

14. CC BY-SA 4.0 International
Common Metadata describing Ontologies
● Established previous work on common
set of attributes for:
○ Policies
○ Databases: Please see our Data Repository
Attribute Working Group Launch meeting
TODAY at the next session!
○ Next steps for terminologies?

15. CC BY-SA 4.0 International
https://fairassist.org
Resource-level metadata is vital for FAIR assessment

16. CC BY-SA 4.0 International
Content & Community Curator Programme
● Gain on-the-job curation expertise
● Engagement and networking with a
community of like-minded people
● Become an expert on data and
metadata standards, repositories and
data policies in their area
● Influence new FAIRsharing
functionalities
● Attribution via ORCID, specialist user
profiles, and others
Curate – Influence – Gain Attribution – Engage – Learn
https://fairsharing.org/community_curation

17. CC BY-SA 4.0 International
Stakeholder Advisors
● Amye Kenall, VP of Publishing and Product, Research Square
● Adam Leary, Oxford University Press
● Catriona MacCallum, Hindawi
● Dagmar Meyer, European Research Council, Executive Agency
● Dominic Fripp, JISC, UK
● Emma Ganley, Protocols.io
● Geraldine Clement-Stoneham, Medical Research Council
● Helena Cousijn, DataCite
● Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, PLoS
● Imma Subirats, FAO of the United Nations
● Kiera McNiece, Cambridge University Press
● Luiz Olavo Bonino, GO-FAIR
● Lorenzo Feri and Sarah Callaghan, Elsevier
● Michael Ball, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
● Mike Huerta, NIH National Library of Medicine
● Molly Cranston and Guillaume Wright, F1000Research
● Nick Everitt and Matthew Cannon, Taylor and Francis
● Scott Edmunds, GigaScience, Oxford University Press
● Simon Hodson, CODATA
● Theo Bloom, British Medical Journal
● Thomas Lemberger, EMBO Press
● Wei-Mun Chan, eLife
● Sowmya Swaminathan, Springer Nature
Current Operational Team
● Allyson Lister, Content and Community Lead
● Milo Thurston, Technical Lead
● Ramon Granell, Data Enrichment & Quality Manager
● Delphine Dauga, Data Curator Manager
● Hiring in progress, Web Developer
● Dominique Batista, Research Software Engineer
● Philippe Rocca-Serra, Co-Founder
● Susanna-Assunta Sansone, PI and Founder
● and many collaborators and contributors!
Executive Advisors
● Varsha Khodiyar, HDRUK
● David Carr, Independent expert
● Chris Graf, Springer Nature
● Marta Teperek, Data Stewardship Coordinator, TUDelft
● Robert Hanisch, Director, NIST Office of Data & Informatics
● Peter McQuilton, FAIRsharing Founding Member, GSK
Community Curators
● Kyle Copas, GBIF
● Annie Elkjær Ørum-Kristensen, GBIF
● Lindsey Anderson, PNNL
● Joe Miller, GBIF
● Malin Sandstrom
Thank you!