FAIR Implementation Profile training for the NICEST-2 Climate Control Community – Workshop material and report

On 2 and 7 September 2022, EOSC-Nordic WP 5.3 organized an online FAIR Implementation Profile (FIP) workshop for the NICEST-2 Climate Control Community as a deliverable in their work package. The workshop aimed to transfer knowledge and train the Climate Community in defining and publishing their FIP.

The FIP workshop will help the NICEST-2 community to increase interoperability and improve machine actionability. In addition, publishing FIPs will further drive convergence within and between domains and may lead to efficiency improvement in the grant application process of funders worldwide.

Prior work on FAIR for the NICEST-2 community

Work package WP5.3 organized a workshop in 2021 (7 & 8 December) on machine-actionable metadata for the NICEST-2 Climate Control Community (M4M workshop). This very successful workshop delivered the tools and know-how to create or reuse domain-relevant metadata templates together with FAIR vocabularies for the NICEST-2 community. A significant step in the direction of FAIR compliance. During that workshop, it became clear that machine-actionable metadata is crucial for any data exchange/data-sharing or data-visiting projects. Internally as well as externally.

One of the main takeaways from the M4M workshop was that the machine needs to find and access the metadata and understand and interpret this.

Highlights of the FIP workshop

The FAIR Implementation Profile workshop in September 2022 is yet another step towards further adherence to the FAIR Principles. The workshop focused on transferring knowledge and trained the participants to define and publish a FAIR Implementation Profile for different (sub)communities. In simple terms, a FIP is a list of implementation choices for each FAIR Principle defined by a community of practice. These implementation choices are called FAIR Enabling Resources (FER).

For example, what are the implementation choices that the NICEST-2 community has made in order to adhere to FAIR Principle F1, and which choice is made to adhere to Principle A2, to Principle I1, to Principle R1 . . . and so forth.

All these chosen FERs define the FIP for the community and its members when creating and exchanging data. A helpful software tool, the FIP WIZARD, has been developed to guide workshop participants in defining their choices. See the following links for more information:

● FIP Wizard 3.0
● FIP Wizard 3.0 User Guide
● FIP Questions and FER Types
● FER Examples (July 2022)

A defined FIP can be recorded and published for internal and external purposes so that other research communities may benefit when FIPs are reused. A FIP can be reused by another community, either in whole or partly, whereby only a limited number of implementation choices are reused. It became clear that this reuse of FIPs will positively impact and may lead to convergence. FAIR Implementation Community (FIC) was introduced to name the community or sub-community that defines and publishes a FIP. In addition, the “output” of a FIP exercise may, in turn, be used as “input” for a machine-actionable Data Management Plan as a “prefilled template.” This relationship between FIPs and maDMPs is highly interesting for funders. It allows the funder to guide the researchers in their choices by “pre-populating” their DMP templates when researchers are invited to reply to grant requests.
FIPS are based on the FIP ontology and can be recorded in RDF as a collection of “nanopublications.”

Each nanopublication includes three parts besides the header: assertion, provenance, and publication details. It is foreseen that in the near future, these FIPs will be published as nanopublications with a short article describing the considerations behind the FIP on a platform called FAIR CONNECT. This platform is in development (a joint initiative by GFF and IOSPress) and will assist communities and funders in searching/finding existing FIPs for repurposing.

The NICEST-2 community decided to use the so-called CMIP6 dataset for defining the CMIP6_data_FIP as CMIP6 is narrow enough to start with a FIP, having the option to expand the FIP at a later point in time.

See the workshop material and recording for more information https://osf.io/j5xbw/

The shared notes of the FIP workshop are accessible via this Google docs link.

For more information, contact:
Bert Meerman at b.meerman(at)gofairfoundation.org, Director of the GO FAIR FOUNDATION, and member of EOSC-Nordic WP5.3.