DRI and FAIR-IMPACT – Making Research Data More FAIR

FAIR-IMPACT aims to support the uptake and implementation of current and emerging FAIR-enabling tools, resources, and methods. Their first open call  featured two defined support actions designed to enhance the FAIRness of data, semantic artefacts and data-related services: ‘FAIRness assessment challenge’ and ‘Enabling FAIR Signposting and RO-Crate for content/metadata discovery and consumption’. DRI will be participating in the second support action. 

The findability of a wide range of research objects and their related metadata are central to the FAIR principles. This support action combines two successful approaches – FAIR Signposting and Research Object Crate (RO-Crate) – to help ensure that research objects can be packaged up with structured metadata to support reuse and that these packages can be exposed for improved findability. 

FAIR Signposting is a method to expose machine-actionable navigation links that indicate downloadable resources, types and attribution – particularly for scholarly and institutional repositories which use persistent identifiers like DOIs. Signposting makes explicit the links between a typical HTML landing page and the downloadable resources that are available for the research object described by that landing page. 

RO-Crate has been established as a community effort to practically achieve FAIR packaging of research objects (digital objects like data, methods, software, etc.) with their structured metadata. RO-Crate is based on well-established Web standards and FAIR principles. It is being adopted by a range of EU/EOSC projects and can be seen as a pragmatic implementation of the FAIR digital objects vision as highlighted by EOSC’s Interoperability Framework. 

The addition of FAIR Signposting headers will significantly enhance the interoperability of the DRI Repository data, while RO-Crate export for Repository data has the potential to provide richer description for context and dependencies and enhanced interoperability.

The FAIR-IMPACT project complements DRI’s work on improving the interoperability of cultural heritage data, which is being undertaken as part of the Horizon Europe-funded WorldFAIR Project. 

Learn more about the successful applicants to the open call.