FAIR Solutions offers a variety of products that enable organisations to fundamentally increase the findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability of their data. All our products are based on the FAIR Principles and fully adhere to the GO FAIR recommended implementation choices.
Make your data findable either within your organisation or to the outside world. Expose the metadata describing your data and allow others to discover their properties.
The FAIR Data Point (FDP) is a software component that allows data owners to expose the metadata of their digital objects in a FAIR manner and allows data users to discover properties about offered datasets (or other types of digital objects) through this metadata. The dataset can, if license conditions allow, also be made publicly accessible.
The FDP is distributed in nature. Therefore it accommodates different usage scenarios. For instance, one organization may choose to have one instance of the FDP "centralizing" their metadata offering while other organizations may choose to have different FDP instances, each exposing the metadata of a different department. Moreover, each FDP can expose the metadata of datasets (or other types of digital objects) that are located elsewhere.
Many different data repositories and datasets should interoperate in order to allow increasingly complex questions to be answered. Data interoperability, however, takes place in different levels, such as syntactical and semantical. A collection of FDPs aims to address some interoperability issues at the metadata level by enabling data owners to share their metadata in a FAIR manner thereby fostering Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability. To support metadata interoperability the FAIR Data Point has a configurable metadata schema and the metadata content is stored and exposed in RDF. See some examples of metadata below:
Fair Solutions maintains a FDP metadata index to improve findability of the content of all registered FDPs. Using the index the metadata of all linked FDPs is visible and accessible.
A ‘Covid19-ready’ FDP, developed for the VODAN (Virus Outbreak Data Access Network), with preconfigured semantic model which can be deployed instantly.
The VODAN FAIR Data Point (FDP) is developed within the VODAN (Virus Outbreak Data Access Network) implementation network. With a VODAN FDP, organisations across the world can publish their metadata about virus outbreak datasets, such as the WHO's COVID-19 case record form RAPID. Together these FDP’s form a network where users can explore metadata informing where data are stored, what definitions and concepts are used and how to gain access to them. The goal is to evolve the VODAN FDP into FAIR Data Stations where data can be accessed and analysed at the station instead of being copied somewhere else.
The GO FAIR Foundation launched the VODAN project (Virus Outbreak Data Network) to demonstrate how the FAIR principles can be applied. VODAN allows researchers to visit federated virus patient data-sources, within the boundaries of GDPR and local requirements. In FAIR Solutions we found the right partner who was able to assist us in executing this complex project within very challenging time scales.
Bert Meerman, Director GO FAIR foundation
In the VODAN implementation network CODATA, RDA, WDS, and GO FAIR supported by many other organisations (see the VODAN manifesto) work on current challenges around the use and reuse of data pertaining virus outbreaks, like the current COVID-19 epidemic. These challenges range from suboptimal data management, to limited data reuse, lack of semantic interoperability and limited access. The organisations involved in the VODAN implementation network have collaborated to implement the VODAN FAIR Data Point to address these challenges.
The FAIR Data Station extends the functionality of the FDP which is focused on metadata. The FAIR Data Station (FDS) supports interaction with the data itself. This interaction can range from API calls to hosting and running containers such as Docker. Naturally, the FDS enforces any access restrictions as defined by the data publisher.
The FAIR Evaluator allows for an automated check on the FAIRness of metadata and data and provides suggestions for improvement where needed.
The FAIR Evaluator is based on the certification criteria provided by the GO FAIR Foundation (GFF). A full document containing all criteria for assessing the FAIRness of metadata and data has been created by the GFF and the FE fully complies with these requirements. Using the FAIR Evaluator your metadata and data can be validated by performing a number of tests and feedback will be provided to increase the FAIRness of your datasets. Passing the tests may lead to a GO FAIR certificate for your (meta)dataset . This service is planned to be operational by the end of 2020.
The FAIR Data Stewardship Wizard (FDSW) is a complete solution for preparing FAIR Data Management Plans (FDMPs) following the FAIR principles. FDSW guides you through the vast knowledge of data stewardship by asking you relevant questions, offering hints, multimedia contents and external resources. The FDSW is offered in collaboration with our partner Codevence.
The questionnaire structure can be fully customised to reflect your specific environment. You can evaluate answers in each questionnaire to get an overview of how good you are doing in terms of FAIR metrics. The resulting FDMP can be exported in various formats and transformed into custom templates. FDSW also supports machine-actionable exports (e.g. JSON, RDF) suitable for further external processing and evaluation.