Dagstuhl Interoperability Workshop: What Do the “Guidelines” Look Like?
I. Overview
This document attempts to explore what the products of the 2019 Dagstuhl Interoperability Workshop might be, within the context that Achim has proposed: detailed guidance on the implementation of the FAIR principles for cross-domain data as enabled by the current crop of metadata specifications and standards and related technology approaches.
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Another aspect of the problem is that – as we learned at last year’s workshop – the issues surrounding data use across domain boundaries are plentiful and extremely broad. Different use cases encounter many of the same basic issues. FAIR helps us to narrow our focus on specific aspects of the problem space, and the use cases give us examples to work through. If we do not have the optimal depth of participant knowledge in terms of the use cases, then we may find that our work takes a more general shape. This dynamic will feed into our “Plan B,” and may encourage us to take a slightly more generic but more technical direction in terms of the workshop outputs.
II. The FAIR Principles
Any guidelines we produce should be understandable immediately to a high-level audience at a general level, and FAIR offers us a good vehicle for this. Any of the guidelines could be explained by saying something like “it is a concrete guide for domains implementing the FAIR principles around Finding data, for users both inside and external to their domain.”
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FAIR does not make this distinction and can only go so far in helping us really provide guidance to those looking at cross-domain data challenges. It gives us a widely accepted framework for identifying the challenges we are addressing. However, this is not a workshop on implementing FAIR, and at a certain point we will need to become more nuanced in how we describe the value of what we are doing. Ultimately, FAIR provides an entry point for understanding our work, but cannot guide us all the way to our end goals.
III. Scope of the Guidelines
One idea is for the Guidelines to address the following topics, in whatever combination seems relevant:
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A checklist approach to producing these guidelines is clearly not sufficient – it is provided here as a way of helping us to think about what we produce in more concrete terms.
IV. An Example: the DCAT-DDI Profile
This example is the most obvious one, coming from the work at last year’s workshop. I will try to address the topics given above in light of this example, to give a bit better sense of what they might be in concrete terms.
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