FAIR Digital Research Objects: Metadata Journeys

The scientific enterprise depends on finding, exchanging, understanding, validating, reproducing, integrating and reusing research entities across a dispersed community of researchers and an ecosystem of research and scholarly communication platforms. We are not just talking about papers, but also the mix of data, software, protocols, models and so on that are research outputs that together form the compendium of knowledge and the means for reuse and reproducibility of experimental outcomes.

What is the unit of Knowledge Exchange for research?  If actionable metadata needs to accompany our research entities (data and software) on their journeys to enable FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) research, how do we do that? If metadata is “a love note to the future” [1], then what’s the envelope?

RO-Crate [2] is an open, community-driven, and lightweight approach to packaging research entities along with their metadata in a machine-readable manner. Following key principles - “just enough” and “developer friendliness” - RO-Crate simplifies the process of making research outputs FAIR while also enhancing research reproducibility. As a self-describing and unbounded “metadata middleware” framework RO-Crate shows that a little bit of packaging goes a long way to not just overcome research platform diversity but celebrate it while retaining investigation contextual integrity.

In this talk I will present the why and wherefore of RO-Crates as metadata packages that journey between researchers, their platforms and around the research lifecycle. I’ll also talk about two other journeys – that of RO-Crates as a concept, a community and an example of “Translational Computer Science” [3], and RO-Crates as an implementation of the emerging FAIR Digital Objects Interoperability framework [4, 5].

[1] Scott J The Metadata Mania, http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3181, June 2011

[2] Soiland-Reyes S et al. “Packaging Research Artefacts with RO-Crate”. Data Science, 2022; 5(2):97-138, DOI: 10.3233/DS-210053

[3] Abramson D, Translational Computer Science https://davidabramson.org/translational-computer-science/

[4] FDO Forum FAIR Digital Objects https://fairdo.org/

[5] Soiland-Reyes S, Sefton P, et al (2022): Creating lightweight FAIR Digital Objects with RO-Crate. Research Ideas and Outcomes, 1st Intl Conf on FAIR Digital Objects.