Assessing RDA’s FAIR Data Maturity Model (FAIR Data Maturity Model Working Group 2020; Bahim et al. 2020) (first 2 columns) against the FDO guidelines (Bonino et al. 2019), FDO implemented with the protocol DOIPv2 (“Digital Object Interface Protocol Specification, Version 2.0” 2018), Linked Data Platform (LDP) (Bonino da Silva Santos, Guizzardi, and Sales 2022) and examples from Linked Data practices in general. (— indicates Unspecified, may be possible with additional conventions)
FAIR ID Indicator FDO guidelines FDO/DOIP FDO/LDP Linked Data examples
RDA-F1-01M Metadata is identified by a persistent identifier FDOF4 Optional Metadata FDO w/separate PID Content-negotiation to URL, not required to be PID Metadata typically don’t have own PID
RDA-F1-01D Data is identified by a persistent identifier FDOF1 PIDs required (FDOF1). Handle, DOI. FDOF-IR (Identifier Record). PID can be any URI “Cool” URIs (Berners-Lee 1998), PURL services incl. purl.org, w3id.org
RDA-F1-02M Metadata is identified by a globally unique identifier FDOR4 FDOF8 Optional Metadata FDO, unspecified how to indicate Content-negotiation to URL Not required, content-negotiation can redirect to URL or Content-Location. FAIR Signposting.
RDA-F1-02D Data is identified by a globally unique identifier FDOF1 All FDOs have PIDs (FDOR1), DOIP uses Handle system FDOF-IR (Identifier Record) Always accessed by URL
RDA-F2-01M Rich metadata is provided to allow discovery FDOF2 FDOF4 FDOF8 FDOF9 FDO has key-value metadata. Unclear how to link to additional metadata. FDOF-IR links to multiple metadata records RDF-based metadata by content negotiation or FAIR Signposting. Embedded in landing page (RDFa).
RDA-F3-01M Metadata includes the identifier for the data — id and type are required metadata elements PIDs, also implicit as requests must use PID PID only required in FDOF-IR record. PID inclusion typical, but often inconsistent (e.g. www.example.com vs example.com) or missing (use of <> as this subject)
RDA-F4-01M Metadata is offered in such a way that it can be harvested and indexed FDOF10 No, registries not required (except Data Type Registries). Handle registry only searchable by PID. — Not specified, several registries/catalogues for vocabularies/types (e.g. (“NCBO BioPortal” n.d.)). Indexing by search engines if exposing HTML w/schema.org.
RDA-A1-01M Metadata contains information to enable the user to get access to the data FDOF3 FDOF6 Directly by DOIP, but not included in FDO metadata. handle.net HTTP resolution may redirect to landing page Any property can point to URIs, but unclear if it is data Common with clickable “follow your nose” URLs
RDA-A1-02M Metadata can be accessed manually (i.e. with human intervention) — (Cordra HTML landing page from handle.net URIs) Optional content-negotiation, e.g. by Apache Marmotta, OpenLink Virtuoso HTTP content-negotiation to HTML is common
RDA-A1-02D Data can be accessed manually (i.e. with human intervention) — (Cordra HTML landing page from handle.net URIs) Optional content-negotiation Direct download, HTML landing pages common for DOIs
RDA-A1-03M Metadata identifier resolves to a metadata record FDOF8+FDOF2 — — Content-Location or HTTP redirection may indicate metadata URI
RDA-A1-03D Data identifier resolves to a digital object FDOF2 Required, but frequently not directly resolvable Recommended, but any URI acceptable Resolvable HTTP/HTTPS URIs are most common, now infrequent URNs are not directly resolvable
RDA-A1-04M Metadata is accessed through standardised protocol G9 FDOF3 Retrievable from PID (FDOF3). Informal DOIP standard maintained by DONA Foundation LDP standard maintained by W3C, HTTP standards maintained by IETF, FDO components resolved by informal proposals (custom vocabulary, extra HTTP methods) or HTTP content negotiation) Formal HTTP standards maintained by IETF, HTTP content negotiation, informal FAIR Signposting
RDA-A1-04D Data is accessible through standardised protocol G9 (see above) HTTP (Fielding, Nottingham, and Reschke 2022) HTTP/HTTPS, FTP (now less common), GridFTP (Allcock et al. 2005) (for large data), ARK (Kunze and Bermès 2022)
RDA-A1-05D Data can be accessed automatically (i.e. by a computer program) G4 FDOF3 FDOF6 Required, but few client libraries HTTP GET, content-negotiation for fdof/object Ubiquitous, hundreds of HTTP libraries
RDA-A1.1-01M Metadata is accessible through a free access protocol G1 G8 G9 Partially realised: Handle system is open1 protocol (Sun et al. 2003). One server implementation (CNRI 2022), free2. One DOIPv2 implementation (Cordra): free under BSD-like license (not recognised as Open Source). LDP is open W3C recommendation (Speicher, Arwe, and Malhotra 2015). Multiple LDP implementations. DNS, HTTP, TLS, RDF standards are open, free and universal, large number of Open Source clients and servers.
RDA-A1.1-01D Data is accessible through a free access protocol G9 (see above) URI, DNS, HTTP, TLS URI, DNS, HTTP, TLS. Non-free DRM may be used (e.g. subscription video streaming)
RDA-A1.2-01D Data is accessible through an access protocol that supports authentication and authorisation (FDOR9) TLS certificates, authentication field (details unspecified) Implied HTTP authentication, TLS certificates
RDA-A2-01M Metadata is guaranteed to remain available after data is no longer available FDOF12 — Unspecified, however FDOF-IR links to separate metadata records —
RDA-I1-01M Metadata uses knowledge representation expressed in standardised format FDOF8 Required, but not currently defined — Always implied by use of RDF syntaxes.
RDA-I1-01D Data uses knowledge representation expressed in standardised format — — — Common (e.g. HDF5, JSON, XML), yet common scientific data formats frequently not standardised
RDA-I1-02M Metadata uses machine-understandable knowledge representation FDOF8 Required Optional RDF metadata with any vocabulary Always implied by use of RDF syntaxes.
RDA-I1-02D Data uses machine-understandable knowledge representation G4 G7 FDOR2 No requirements on binary data formats Only indirectly, LDP Basic Container reference only information resources Common, specially for scientific data formats
RDA-I2-01M Metadata uses FAIR-compliant vocabularies G3 FDOF10 Informally required Unspecified, implied by use of RDF? FAIR practices for LD vocabularies increasingly common, sometimes inconsistent (e.g. PURLs that don’t resolve) or incomplete (e.g. unknown license)
RDA-I2-01D Data uses FAIR-compliant vocabularies — — — Uncommon, except for some XML and RDF-embedding formats, e.g. Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) (ISO 16684-1:2019 — Graphic Technology — Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) — Part 1: Data Model, Serialization and Core Properties 2019)
RDA-I3-01M Metadata includes references to other metadata FDOR8 Implied (attributes to PIDs), currently unspecified if given attribute is value or reference — By definition (Linked Data reference existing URIs (“Linked Data” 2015)), rdfs:seeAlso, FAIR signposting (Van de Sompel et al. 2022) describedby
RDA-I3-01D Data includes references to other data G6 FDOR3 FDOR11 — — URL hyperlinks common in several formats (HTML, PDF, JSON, XML).
RDA-I3-02M Metadata includes references to other data G6 FDOR3 FDOR8 Implied from custom FDO type’s attribute LDP Direct Container members can be any resources URI objects are frequently data references, may be indirect via PID
RDA-I3-02D Data includes qualified references to other data FDOR3 FDOR11 Only indirectly through FDO metadata Indirectly through LDP membership Uncommon: Link relations, FAIR Signposting
RDA-I3-03M Metadata includes qualified references to other metadata (FDOR3) Qualification by attribute keys defined per FDO Type LDP Direct Container Qualifications by property, PROV bundles (Lebo and Moreau 2013), schema.org/Role
RDA-I3-04M Metadata include qualified references to other data (FDOR3) Qualification by attribute keys defined per FDO type LDP Indirect Container Qualifications by property, n-ary indirection (schema.org Role (Holland and Johnson 2014), prov:specializationOf (Lebo, McGuinness, and Sahoo 2013), OAI-ORE Proxy (Lagoze et al. 2008))
RDA-R1-01M Plurality of accurate and relevant attributes are provided to allow reuse FDOF4 Required. Kernel metadata attributes desired (Broeder et al. 2022) but not assigned PIDs yet. Unspecified. Multiple metadata records can allow multiple semantic profiles. Large number of general and domain-specific vocabularies can make it hard to find relevant attributes. Rough consensus on kernel metadata: schema.org (“Schema.org - Schema.org” n.d.), Dublin Core Terms (DCMI Usage Board 2020), DCAT (Browning et al. 2020), FOAF (Brickley and Miller 2014)
RDA-R1.1-01M Metadata includes information about the licence under which the data can be reused — licenseConditions URL/PID in kernel metadata (Broeder et al. 2022) — Dublin Core Terms dct:license frequently recommended, frequently not required, e.g. by DCAT 2 (Browning et al. 2020)
RDA-R1.1-02M Metadata refers to a standard reuse licence — — — SPDX and Creative Commons URIs common, identifiers often inconsistent
RDA-R1.1-03M Metadata refers to a machine-understandable reuse licence — — — SPDX documents uncommon
RDA-R1.2-01M Metadata includes provenance information according to community-specific standards FDOR9 FDOR10 Unspecified (some Cordra types add getProvenance methods). PID Kernel attributes? — W3C PROV-O, PAV
RDA-R1.2-02M Metadata includes provenance information according to a cross-community language FDOR9 FDOR8 — — W3C PROV-O (Lebo, McGuinness, and Sahoo 2013), PAV (Ciccarese et al. 2013), Dublin Core Terms (DCMI Usage Board 2020)
RDA-R1.3-01M Metadata complies with a community standard FDOR10 FROR8 (Emerging, e.g. DiSSCo Digital Specimen (Hardisty et al. 2022)) — Common, e.g. DCAT 2 (Browning et al. 2020), BioSchemas (Gray et al. 2017)
RDA-R1.3-01D Data complies with a community standard (FDOR3) — — Common, HTTP use registered IANA media types, additional scientific file formats frequently not standardised or identified
RDA-R1.3-02M Metadata is expressed in compliance with a machine-understandable community standard FDOF4 FDOF10 Recommended — Common practice for ontologies, specially in bioinformatics, e.g. BioPortal (“NCBO BioPortal” n.d.), Darwin Core (Wieczorek et al. 2012)
RDA-R1.3-02D Data is expressed in compliance with a machine-understandable community standard (FDOR2) No, FDO is typed but data can be any bytestream — Occassionally, (e.g. GFF3, FITS, ESRI)
Allcock, W., J. Bresnahan, R. Kettimuthu, and M. Link. 2005. “The Globus Striped GridFTP Framework and Server.” In SC ’05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing. Seattle, WA, USA: IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/sc.2005.72.
Bahim, Christophe, Carlos Casorrán-Amilburu, Makx Dekkers, Edit Herczog, Nicolas Loozen, Konstantinos Repanas, Keith Russell, and Shelley Stall. 2020. “The FAIR Data Maturity Model: An Approach to Harmonise FAIR Assessments.” Data Science Journal 19 (October). https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-041.
Berners-Lee, Tim. 1998. “Cool URIs Don’t Change.” Style Guide for Online Hypertext. 1998. https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.
Bonino da Silva Santos, Luiz Olavo, Giancarlo Guizzardi, and Tiago Prince Sales. 2022. “FAIR Digital Object Framework Documentation.” Working Draft. Edited by Luiz Olavo Bonino da Silva Santos. October 27, 2022. https://fairdigitalobjectframework.org/.
Bonino, Luiz, Oeter Wittenburg, Bonnie Carroll, Alex Hardisty, Mark Leggott, and Carlo Zwölf. 2019. “FAIR Digital Object Framework.” {{FDOF}} Technical Implementation Guideline. FDOF Technical Implementation Guideline. Group of European Data Experts in RDA (GEDE-RDA). https://github.com/GEDE-RDA-Europe/GEDE/blob/master/FAIR%20Digital%20Objects/FDOF/FAIR%20Digital%20Object%20Framework-v1-02.docx.
Brickley, Dan, and Libby Miller. 2014. “FOAF Vocabulary Specification.” January 14, 2014. http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/.
Broeder, Daan, Peter Wittenburg, Ivonne Anders, and Karsten Peters-von Gehlen. 2022. “FDO – Kernel Attributes & Metadata.” Proposed Recommendation PR-FDO-KernelAttributesAndMetadata-2.0-20221017. Edited by Daan Broeder, Peter Wittenburg, Ivonne Anders, and Karsten Peters-von Gehlen. FDO Specification Documents - November 2022. FDO Forum. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7825693.
Browning, David, Peter Winstanley, Andrea Perego, Simon Cox, Riccardo Albertoni, and Alejandra Gonzalez Beltran. 2020. Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) - Version 2. {W3C Recommendation}. W3C. https://www.w3.org/TR/2020/REC-vocab-dcat-2-20200204/.
Ciccarese, Paolo, Stian Soiland-Reyes, Khalid Belhajjame, Alasdair JG Gray, Carole Goble, and Tim Clark. 2013. “PAV Ontology: Provenance, Authoring and Versioning.” Journal of Biomedical Semantics 4 (1): 37. https://doi.org/10.1186/2041-1480-4-37.
CNRI. 2022. “Handle.net Software.” Corporation for National Research Initiatives. 2022. https://www.handle.net/download_hnr.html.
DCMI Usage Board. 2020. DCMI Metadata Terms. {DCMI Recommendation}. https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/dcmi-terms/2020-01-20/.
“Digital Object Interface Protocol Specification, Version 2.0.” 2018. DONA Foundation. https://hdl.handle.net/0.DOIP/DOIPV2.0.
FAIR Data Maturity Model Working Group. 2020. “FAIR Data Maturity Model: Specification and Guidelines.” Edited by Edit Herczog, Keith Russell, and Shelley Stall, June. https://doi.org/10.15497/rda00050.
Fielding, Roy T., Mark Nottingham, and Julian Reschke. 2022. HTTP Semantics. Request for Comments. RFC Editor. https://doi.org/10.17487/rfc9110.
Gray, Alasdair, Carole Goble, Rafael Jimenez, and Bioschemas Community. 2017. “Bioschemas: From Potato Salad to Protein Annotation.” In Proceedings of the ISWC 2017 Posters & Demonstrations and Industry Tracks Co-Located with 16th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2017), edited by Nadeschda Nikitina, Dezhao Song, Achille Fokoue, and Peter Haase. Vol. 1963. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. Vienna, Austria. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1963/paper579.pdf.
Hardisty, Alex, Paul Brack, Carole Goble, Laurence Livermore, Ben Scott, Quentin Groom, Stuart Owen, and Stian Soiland-Reyes. 2022. “The Specimen Data Refinery: A Canonical Workflow Framework and FAIR Digital Object Approach to Speeding up Digital Mobilisation of Natural History Collections.” Data Intelligence 4 (2): 320–41. https://doi.org/10.1162/dint_a_00134.
Holland, Vicki Tardif, and Jason Johnson. 2014. “Introducing ’Role’.” Official Blog for Schema.org. June 14, 2014. http://blog.schema.org/2014/06/introducing-role.html.
ISO 16684-1:2019 — Graphic Technology — Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) — Part 1: Data Model, Serialization and Core Properties. 2019. ISO. https://www.iso.org/standard/75163.html.
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  1. The Handle.net system was previously covered by software patent US6135646A which expired in 2013.↩︎

  2. The Handle.net public license is not OSI-approved (“Licenses & Standards” 2022) as an open source license – it includes usage restrictions and requires Service Agreements. It is not a DOIP requirement to host a local Handle instance, e.g. EOSC provides the B2HANDLE service for acquiring Handle prefixes.↩︎