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This document expands on and provides nuance to some of the concepts defined in the EOSC Interoperability Framework report from the EOSC Executive Board Working Groups (WG) FAIR and Architecture published in 2021 and the conceptualisation of an EOSC Interoperability Framework that it embodies (EOSC-IF). It accounts for a deep-dive into the landscape of semantic interoperability implementations and a wide range of interoperability scenarios focused around the Semantic Interoperability Specification, some subtypes of Semantic Business Objects, as well as the Semantic Artefact Catalogue and Mapping Repository. A small set of new concepts of relevance to this work and to EOSC at large have also been added. The introduction provides context to the creation of this report, the basic concepts section provides and overview of the related components of the EOSC-IF, and the following four sections summarise explorations that frame the concluding set of recommendations to the EOSC community at large. The explorations that frame the recommendations are titled as follows: The Semantic Interoperability Specification: Implementation profiles for communities The Semantic Artefact Catalogue: Twelve maturity dimensions The Mapping Repository: Making a case for FAIR mappings and crosswalks Implementation examples: Common use cases and real-world case studies The recommendations themselves are organised under the following five broad categories: Align emerging adaptations and implementations to the Semantic View of the EOSC-IF (pp. 39–42) reference architecture. Identify and consolidate different approaches to representing and exchanging (meta)data with the FAIR Digital Objects model described in the EOSC-IF (pp. 29–34). Extend the EOSC-IF to include a research process perspective that can support convergence on solutions for common use cases. Extend the set of Semantic Business Objects described in the EOSC-IF (pp. 40–41) to include artefacts such as mappings and crosswalks. Recognis, This is a report of the EOSC Association’s Task Force Semantic Interoperability (2021–2023). The document was developed in continuous consultation with the task force membership (September 2023–March 2024), where a subgroup of the membership actively contributed to authoring the text. The document was submitted to EOSC Association’s Quality Review Committee (QRC) and an open community consultation on 18 January. The response to the reviewer’s comments was submitted on 12 March and the current version was approved with minor revisions on 27 March. Read more about the EOSC Association, the role of its task forces and the task forces’ membership on the eosc.eu website.

This poster was presented during the Poster Exhibition session at the Research Data Alliance (RDA) 21st Plenary during International Data Week 2023 in Salzburg, Austria on 23–26 October 2023. It was submitted by Kurt Baumann on behalf of the EOSC Semantic Interoperability Task Force. Description of the poster Interoperability is at the heart of the FAIR principles and the design of large-scale cross-disciplinary infrastructures. The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is a European-wide effort towards such an infrastructure, aiming to deepen regional research collaboration and realising a shared data space for science, research and innovation. The advisory group on metadata and data quality has formed a task force focusing on developing and implementing recommendations for SI (EOSC SI Task Force). This poster serves as an invitation to the global RDA community to join forces with the European research stakeholders to converge on globally relevant and scalable solutions for Semantic Interoperability (SI). Semantic Interoperability is in fact not easy to implement. Any strategy for achieving SI must take this complexity into account. The poster presents the work of a stakeholder organisation that represents the research community's voice in EOSC and focuses on the activities of a task force developing and implementing recommendations for SI. Realising solutions for semantic interoperability involves a broad spectrum of socio-technical challenges. The poster will give insights into the chosen approach and structure of an ongoing survey that will result in a landscape overview of the use of components required to enable SI across a wide range of disciplines and use cases. Individual members of the task force are already committed contributors across various RDA interest groups and working groups and by presenting this poster the ambition is to showcase existing synergies and to identify new venues for collaborations. EOSC Project m

We observe a growing universe of machine-readable knowledge organisation systems (KOS) or even wider ‘semantic artifacts. We see at the same time, various attempts to bring semantic artifacts together via registries, catalogues and via cross-walks among ontologies. This poster reflects how newest research on semantic interoperability informs current practice for research data repositories and registry service providers. We focus on the domain of humanities and cultural heritage, using different examples from Europe and the Netherlands: The European Archaeological Data Infrastructure Ariadne, services of the Dutch Cultural Heritage Network and two Data Stations (for Archaeology and for SSH) hosted at DANS-KNAW. For those cases we report on current efforts to include ‘semantic artifacts’, together with opportunities and challenges. This poster is a practice report combined with an invitation to reflect about the context of semantic interoperability itself.

Presentation of the methodology proposed for semantic artefact FAIR assessment. Semantic artefacts (i.e., ontologies, vocabularies and SKOS taxonomies, among others) define the structure, guide the construction of, and help validate many existing Knowledge Graphs. In the last years, a number of guidelines have been proposed (Poveda-Villalón et al. 2020; Garijo and Poveda-Villalón 2020; Hugo et al. 2020; Le Franc et al., 2022; Xu et al. 2023) to align semantic artefact best practices against the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable principles (FAIR principles) (Wilkinson et al. 2016). Based on these guidelines, new validators and assistants have been developed (Garijo et al. 2021; Amdouni et al. 2022a; 2022b) in order to guide users assessing their own semantic artefacts against the FAIR principles. However, different tests are based on different interpretations of the FAIR principles, resulting in different scores and checks for semantic artefacts. To the best of our knowledge, there is no generic methodology grouping the types of tests to perform in semantic artefacts, in order to map existing assessment efforts in a consistent manner. In this document, we propose such a methodology. We do so by taking an ontology development perspective, dividing semantic artefacts into smaller parts (their code, content, ontology metadata, etc.) that can be individually assessed at different stages of their development process. We build on the Linked Open Terms (LOT) methodology (Poveda-Villalón et al. 2022), adding a “FAIR assessment” module, and, for each activity, we validate our approach by mapping to two existing semantic artefact FAIR assessment validators: FOOPS! (Garijo et al. 2021) and O’FAIRe (Amdouni et al. 2022a; 2022b). The rest of the document outlines our methodology, describes each step in detail, and maps it to existing FAIR principles and guidelines.

Semantic interoperability (SI) is at the heart of the FAIR principles and the design of large-scale cross-disciplinary infrastructures. The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is a European-wide effort towards such an infrastructure, aiming to deepen regional research collaboration and realising a shared data space for science, research and innovation. In this context, the research community’s voice is represented by the EOSC Association (EOSC-A) and a number of advisory groups with a broad range of representatives from different stakeholder organisations. The advisory group on metadata and data quality has formed a task force focusing on developing and implementing recommendations for SI (EOSC SI Task Force) to converge on globally relevant and scalable SI solutions for EOSC. This paper provides context to SI in EOSC, the various components contributing to it, as well as some views on the socio-technical challenges to arriving at a consensus. In particular, the paper provides motivation for exploring the heterogeneity of SI solutions demonstrated across scientific communities and insight into the task force’s planned approach to conducting a survey to identify relevant components and structures. The paper is also an invitation to the global community to align and engage with the task force’s activities going forward.

This document provides supplementary material for the paper "Converging towards a Semantic interoperability framework for EOSC: understanding the different community solutions to semantic interoperability" submitted as a contribution to the 2nd Workshop on Ontologies for FAIR and FAIR Ontologies (Onto4FAIR). Its purpose is to provide additional information and insights about the questionnaire approach proposed to survey the resources utilised by communities in addressing semantic interoperability issues. This document will be used as a guide in the implementation of the questionnaire, planned to be ready by the end of June. The survey itself will be ongoing over the summer and terminate at the end of September 2023.

The Goal is to get the latest FAIR Data Point protocol supported by 1 or 2 of the working repositories selected by FAIRsFAIR at the beginning of the project, showing and proving interoperability between different implementations and automatic integration of catalogue information from different implementations. We would like to have technical people from the repositories on board, so that the implementation that will be worked on could be a branch of the official code, being close to an actual implementation by the running deployment of the repositories later. Note that what we are striving for is adding an FDP API, not replacing any existing repository functionality but adding an additional way that makes repositories more semantically interoperable and machine-actionable.

The FAIR principles provide guidelines for the publication of digital resources such as datasets, code, workflows, and research objects aiming at making them Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable(1). Amongst them, the I of the FAIR promotes interoperability and more specifically principle I2 suggests that metadata should use vocabularies that themselves follow the FAIR principles. Recently, FAIRsFAIR1 project officially published a first iteration of recommendations for making vocabularies FAIR (2). These recommendations include 17 general recommendations aligned with the different FAIR Principles and 10 Best Practice recommendations. The main objective of these recommendations is to provide a set of guidelines for creating a harmonised and interoperable semantic landscape easing the use and reuse of semantic artefacts from multiple different scientific domains.

The Goal is to get the latest FAIR Data Point protocol supported by 1 or 2 of the working repositories selected by FAIRsFAIR at the beginning of the project, showing and proving interoperability between different implementations and automatic integration of catalogue information from different implementations. We would like to have technical people from the repositories on board, so that the implementation that will be worked on could be a branch of the official code, being close to an actual implementation by the running deployment of the repositories later. Note that what we are striving for is adding an FDP API, not replacing any existing repository functionality but adding an additional way that makes repositories more semantically interoperable and machine-actionable.

The FAIR principles provide guidelines for the publication of digital resources such as datasets, code, workflows, and research objects aiming at making them Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable(1). Amongst them, the I of the FAIR promotes interoperability and more specifically principle I2 suggests that metadata should use vocabularies that themselves follow the FAIR principles. Recently, FAIRsFAIR1 project officially published a first iteration of recommendations for making vocabularies FAIR (2). These recommendations include 17 general recommendations aligned with the different FAIR Principles and 10 Best Practice recommendations. The main objective of these recommendations is to provide a set of guidelines for creating a harmonised and interoperable semantic landscape easing the use and reuse of semantic artefacts from multiple different scientific domains.

This document is the second iteration of recommendations for making semantic artefacts FAIR. These recommendations result from initial discussions during a brainstorming workshop organised by FAIRsFAIR as a co-located event with the 14th RDA Plenary meeting in Helsinki. Based on the feedback received there, 17 preliminary recommendations related to one or more of the FAIR principles, and 10 best practice recommendations on semantic artefacts were documented. These recommendations were first published as Deliverable 2.2 at the beginning of 2020[1]. Following various dissemination and stakeholder engagement activities, including an evaluation workshop held in October 2020, this second iteration of recommendations and best practices are proposed.

This document is the second iteration of recommendations for making semantic artefacts FAIR. These recommendations result from initial discussions during a brainstorming workshop organised by FAIRsFAIR as a co-located event with the 14th RDA Plenary meeting in Helsinki. Based on the feedback received there, 17 preliminary recommendations related to one or more of the FAIR principles, and 10 best practice recommendations on semantic artefacts were documented. These recommendations were first published as Deliverable 2.2 at the beginning of 2020[1]. Following various dissemination and stakeholder engagement activities, including an evaluation workshop held in October 2020, this second iteration of recommendations and best practices are proposed.

QC 20120214