WORK PACKAGES UPDATE (04/04/2014)
Work Package 1
We have produced a very first draft of a 'one pager' to pitch the Data FAIRport initiative, based on the Elevator pitches collected during the workshop, the reactions to the second survey and many discussions with individual in- and outside the meeting participant group.
Niklas Blomberg and Barend Mons visited the European Commission with H2020 and DG Connect staff attending to present the Data FAIRport initiative in the broader context of data stewardship requirements in H2020. The crucial difference between 'Open' (as in ‘hooking a server to the internet’) and FAIR and the fact that 'accessible' could include restricted access for patient or proprietary data was discussed. Barend also visited NIH and NSF and also presented the Data FAIRport initiative there. We will try to actively engage key people from these major organisations in the regular review of the developing working plan.
Main topics over the coming period will include the general FAIR principles, how they relate to the 'convention', the technical specs of what is minimally needed 'under the hood' and a plan on how this would result in a lean and mean organisation (existing or new) to support these 'technical issues'. Bengt Persson (co-chairing WP 1 with Barend) has also taken the initiative to set up an Interest Group in RDA, which is ELIXIR initiated but has the ideal to bridge between several groups on data interoperability and will be quite important for Data FAIRport, and a good link to WP2.
Work Package 2
Tim and Barend had discussions with several 'Enablers' in the USA and Europe and came to the conclusion that in the same spirit of having a two-step process for writing a plan (first agree on what we want to achieve and only work out the technical and organisational steps after that) the engagement of Enablers should also follow a two-step process.
The first step in this case would be to come to an agreed definition of FAIR date. In this context we discussed the Joint Data Citation Principles (JDCP) as initiated by Force11. The JDCP is coordinated by one of our Enabling partners Force11 and several FAIRport participants either helped to develop these principles, or have personally or organizationally endorsed them. We believe that the JDCP already adequately describes the principles of FAIR data and therefore consider endorsing the JDCP a perfect first step for partners in the FAIRport initiative that join our efforts.
The technical implementation of these data FAIRness principles is not addressed by Force11 nor are ‘data stewardship’ issues, such as long term preservation and funding. As Data FAIRport focuses on implementing these data FAIRness principles we believe the two initiatives are strongly connected. On the Data FAIRport website we offer the option to endorse the JDCP.
We have had an initial discussion with the DCP Dissemination Group (DG) co-chair, Paul Uhlir of the US National Academy of Sciences, and we will participate on upcoming DG conference calls. Unless we receive objections from the group we (Tim and Barend) will act as representing Data FAIRport interests in these meetings.
Work Package 3
The Skunk group is a fast growing and vibrant community with regular TC's. A first hackathon is planned with Stanford and Maastricht in the context of a hackathon on ‘a network of BioThings’. We have submitted a proposal for a Data FAIRport exemplar to EUDAT which has been received very positively.
The group has identified many technologies that will make a contribution such as Dataverse, Right-field, and the JERM ontology. Tim is strongly advocating doing the URI-to-ontology mappings using a recently published method based on SKOS, and he'll be presenting his idea more concretely at future meetings and at the hackathon itself. The hackathon will be held in the USA and in Maastricht on the 26/27 of April. Registration is now open! (Free registration for EU participants).