Vision
A focal point in our strategy on open science is making research data FAIR and open. And as we like to believe: interlinked.
The FAIR principles outlined in Wilkinson et al. guide the enterprise of research data management towards making data: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.
In a broader scope (i.e. outside the more strict research domain) there are the additional principles of linked-open-data and the semantic web to consider.
We very much see these as going hand in hand: the one set of guidelines naturally extends and completes the other; and the ubiquitous web-stack provides the methodology, the technology, and the practical platform for reliable and interoperable information exchange on a global scale.
There is no separate web for research and science.
The daring goal for #openscience is to let to let quality research data play its educational role by entering the same arena now populated by lolcatz, fake news, and antivax-conspiracies.
In conclusion, these guiding principles urge research data management to take an outside ignorant view on the data they are intimately familiar with. The challenge is to assess and expose, and not to assume that end users have the inside knowledge of domain experts or have the familiar use-cases. The goal is to make sure that the information content of the data becomes more and more readily readable to these new audiences:
- research experts from different domains
- stakeholders from outside research: citizen-scientist, policy makers, and the general public
- automated processes in an emerging field of computer-assisted research
Packaged in a compelling story, we motivate the above goals in the so called «Felicity Jones effect»
Technical Approach
To achieve that vision we have selected a number of objectives to focus on:
- apply RDF to expose the data we have as linked-open-data publications
- provide harvestable change-feeds on our data catalogues using standards such as OAI-PMH and LDES
- apply RO-Crate
- provide multilingual support to reference vocabularies
- promote an open (platform-neutral) web-intergration approach through proper REST APIs and open WebComponents
- provide traceable provenance data following the EOSC-LIFE Common Provenance Model
Practical Examples
The above is shown in practice in our available linked-data publications as well as in the many applications and tools or software packages we provide.