FDO Manager: Minimum Viable FAIR Digital Object Implementation

2024-02-06

FDO

AI Summary

In the digital era, ensuring long-term accessibility and interoperability of research data faces challenges including complex management and high implementation barriers. This paper proposes and implements the first minimum viable FAIR Digital Object (FDO) system tailored to research artifacts—datasets, publications, and code—built upon the FDO specification with a lightweight FDO manager. Methodologically, it integrates RESTful APIs, JSON-LD metadata, persistent identifiers (DOIs/Handles), and a lightweight storage architecture to support end-to-end FDO creation, resolution, and cross-platform interoperability validation. Key contributions include: (1) abstraction of core FDO functionality balancing standardization and deployment simplicity; (2) the first empirical instantiation of the FDO paradigm for real-world research assets; and (3) substantial reduction in the practical cost and technical barriers to implementing FAIR principles, delivering a reusable, extensible reference implementation for FAIR data infrastructure.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Ontologies

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Federated Web and WoT systems, including distributed, federated and edge-based data processing
• Semantics and Knowledge: Provenance, trust, security and privacy, and ethical issues in managing semantic data

Abstract

In the digital age, data has emerged as one of the most valuable assets across various sectors, including academia, industry, and healthcare. Effective data preservation involves the management of data to ensure its long-term accessibility and usability. Given the importance and sensitivity of data, the need for effective management is a crucial necessity. One of the big recent proposed approaches for data management is the FAIR Digital Objects (FDOs) which has emerged to revolutionize the field of data management and preservation. Central to this revolution is the alignment of FDOs with the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), particularly emphasizing machine-actionability and interoperability across diverse data ecosystems. This paper presents ”FDO Manager,” a Minimum Viable Implementation of FDOs, tailored specifically for the use case and field of research artefacts such as datasets, publications, and code. The paper discusses the core ideas behind the FDO Manager, its architecture, usage and implementation details, as well as its potential impact, demonstrating a simple and abstract implementation of FDOs in the research realm.

Problem

• Implementing FAIR Digital Objects for research data management
• Ensuring machine-actionable and interoperable data preservation
• Simplifying FDO adoption for research artefacts like datasets

Innovation

• FAIR Digital Objects for data management
• Machine-actionable and interoperable FDOs
• Simple abstract FDO implementation