Workshop Report: “Interoperability for Cross-Domain Research: FAIR Vocabularies”
Virtual, 27 September - 1 October, 2021, Australian time-zones
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A workshop on the FAIR publication of technical vocabularies was held as a virtual event, with two daily sessions over four and a half days. The event was sponsored by CODATA (the Committee on Data of the International Science Council), and the Data Documentation Initiative Alliance (DDI), and supported by Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) and Dept. Agriculture, Water and Environment (DAWE). It was organized by Rowan Brownlee (ARDC), Simon Cox (CSIRO), Kheeran Dharmawardena (DAWE), Steve McEachern (Australian National University), and Lesley Wyborn (Australian National University).
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The workshop brought together 25 participants from across Australia, representing a variety of disciplines and organizations across applications in geospatial data, earth and environmental science, official statistics, humanities and social science, health, and indigenous data, alongside a group of technology experts. Workshop activities were based around developing and testing practices for preparation, publication and maintenance of FAIR vocabularies.
Participants were requested to bring examples of candidate ‘non-FAIR’ vocabularies. In the first activity (two days), four of these were selected for examination in small breakout teams, using the framework of the Ten Simple Rules for Making a Vocabulary FAIR (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009041 ). The vocabularies selected by the participants were: colour names (from the ‘Munsell’ charts Munsell colour system), dwelling types (from AS 4590), historical police districts and administrative areas, and a small ecology classification (GBIF ‘Establishment Means’Establishment Means).
Few vocabularies remain fixed forever following their creation and publication. So the second exercise (two days) was to consider requirements and practices for maintenance, revision and versioning of vocabularies, based on studying the same example vocabularies. As a result, a template of Concerns in governing and managing a FAIR vocabulary has been generated, consisting of six broad concerns – 1. Scope and context; 2. Stakeholders; 3. Content management; 4. Revision and change requests; 5. Implementation and communication of changes; 6. Persistence and sustainability. Each of these are subdivided into more specific details.
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