1. A Semi-Automated Workflow for FAIR Maturity Indicators in the Life Sciences
- Author
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Iseult Lynch, Ammar Ammar, Jeaphianne van Rijn, Laurent A. Winckers, Joris T.K. Quik, Martine Bakker, Serena Bonaretti, Egon Willighagen, Dieter Maier, Bioinformatica, and RS: NUTRIM - R1 - Obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular health
- Subjects
Computer science ,CURATION ,General Chemical Engineering ,Interoperability ,02 engineering and technology ,Reuse ,MINIMUM INFORMATION ,Article ,Jupyter Notebook ,lcsh:Chemistry ,03 medical and health sciences ,Schema (psychology) ,COMPLETENESS ,QUALITY ,General Materials Science ,Use case ,FAIR maturity indicators ,030304 developmental biology ,GENE-EXPRESSION ,0303 health sciences ,FAIR guidelines ,life sciences ,021001 nanoscience & nanotechnology ,chEMBL ,Data science ,NANOMATERIAL DATA ,Metadata ,Data sharing ,Workflow ,lcsh:QD1-999 ,0210 nano-technology ,STANDARDS - Abstract
Data sharing and reuse are crucial to enhance scientific progress and maximize return of investments in science. Although attitudes are increasingly favorable, data reuse remains difficult due to lack of infrastructures, standards, and policies. The FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) principles aim to provide recommendations to increase data reuse. Because of the broad interpretation of the FAIR principles, maturity indicators are necessary to determine the FAIRness of a dataset. In this work, we propose a reproducible computational workflow to assess data FAIRness in the life sciences. Our implementation follows principles and guidelines recommended by the maturity indicator authoring group and integrates concepts from the literature. In addition, we propose a FAIR balloon plot to summarize and compare dataset FAIRness. We evaluated the feasibility of our method on three real use cases where researchers looked for six datasets to answer their scientific questions. We retrieved information from repositories (ArrayExpress, Gene Expression Omnibus, eNanoMapper, caNanoLab, NanoCommons and ChEMBL), a registry of repositories, and a searchable resource (Google Dataset Search) via application program interfaces (API) wherever possible. With our analysis, we found that the six datasets met the majority of the criteria defined by the maturity indicators, and we showed areas where improvements can easily be reached. We suggest that use of standard schema for metadata and the presence of specific attributes in registries of repositories could increase FAIRness of datasets.
- Published
- 2020
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