On 25 May 2016, thirty people gathered in Amsterdam for a DTL Focus Meeting on FAIR developments. “It was quite a fruitful meeting. There were many people that we had not met before and there was a lot of interaction between participants. And what is best: we agreed on a concrete follow-up step”, reports the organiser Luiz Bonino.
The acronym FAIR stands for ‘Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable’. The FAIR Data principles act as a guideline for those wishing to enhance the reusability of their research data, for both humans and computers. DTL/ELIXIR-NL actively promotes FAIR data stewardship, for instance by organising ‘Bring your own data workshops’ and by driving the development of technology and infrastructure to support FAIR data stewardship.
In the Netherlands, several groups are involved in developing FAIR Data technologies. The Focus meeting on 25 May gathered these groups to:
- share the latest developments;
- discuss how to align the many existing and future efforts;
- guarantee that we have interoperable solutions complying with the FAIR Data Principles.
Presentations
Participants were involved in topics ranging from data management and data research such as FAIR data lockers, to applications such a nutrition, rare diseases, genetics, systems biology, ecology, etcetera. Five people presented their work; you can download the presentations here:
- Sanne Abeln: Update on ELIXIR – TraIT pilot
- Luiz Bonino: Focus meeting on FAIR data developments
- Morris Swertz: MOLGENIS/Connect – Towards a semi-automatic FAIRifier service to recode data for interoperability
- Egon Willighagen: Using a common interoperability approach for identifier mapping in Open PHACTS and WikiPathways
- Jildau Bouman: DASH-IN: the infrastructure of ENPADASI, using the FAIR concept in nutrition data
Follow-up
Luiz Bonino: “As a concrete next step of the Focus meeting, we agreed that I will organise a workshop where we will define a straightforward checklist to assess whether a data or service is FAIR. We will use take a few datasets and services as a test case.”
About DTL Focus meetings
The DTL core team and DTL-associated scientists regularly signal problems or solutions that come up in multiple contexts. For such topics, DTL organises focus meetings, where participants discuss a subject that crosses borders between technologies or sectors. Participants have usually never met in that composition before. Focus meetings are announced in the Events section of the DTL website.