WorldFAIR

Joined up data; joined up research infrastructures; joined up solutions to wicked global problems.

Monday 2 December, 1:00 – 5:00pm, Location to be Confirmed

Delivery format: Hybrid

Event Description

How can Research Infrastructures prepare data that better meets communities’ research needs?  What are the drivers for this new role?  What are the challenges and opportunities? What are the necessary investments in infrastructure, technology, standards and capacities?

Increasingly the role of Research Infrastructures (RIs) is to provide data products that meet researchers’ requirements and help address the research challenges with which they are confronted.  It is no longer sufficient simply to provide generic technical services (network, storage and compute) or to regard data stewardship as providing a catalogue by which researchers may access datasets, which still need to be combined and orchestrated to be ‘research ready’.  Increasingly, RIs are called upon to provide more targeted services for research communities and to play a role in data orchestration.  We witness this in the development of the ARDC’s Thematic Research Data Commons, in the work of the RIs beginning to compose EOSC and in the OSCARS project.  There are numerous drivers for these developments.  The most urgent and pressing is the need to support interdisciplinary research for global challenges.  Humanity and the planet are confronted by many ‘wicked problems’, which can only be addressed through the participation of many stakeholders in transdisciplinary research processes.  For solutions to ‘wicked problems’ to be grounded in evidence, also necessary is the orchestration of large volumes of heterogeneous data in a way that enables the modelling of complex systems and machine-assisted analysis at scale.

Related to this are some of the most pressing opportunities and challenges of 21^st century research: these include the imperative for reproducible and transparent research, the need to ensure the responsible use of AI in science; compliance with the CARE principles, and the need for more efficient management of access to sensitive data.

The FAIR principles provide some guidance on how to address these issues.  Adding essential detail, the WorldFAIR project demonstrates that a fundamental shift is required from the current bibliographic approach to data stewardship to a data engineering approach.  In the latter, data are treated as collections of ‘datums’ (individual data points, measurements, observations, annotations etc), each of which has sufficient associated information to be treated independently if necessary.  It is precisely this which enables the recombination and orchestration of data from multiple sources to address the complex challenges described above, and for these processes to be automated.  It is the currently highly manual approach to data wrangling, often on the basis of inadequate, inexplicit and non-standardised metadata and semantics, that is the primary source of the opportunity cost of not having FAIR data that was highlighted in the eponymous report for the European Commission.

As well as making policy recommendations that call for this fundamental shift, WorldFAIR published the first part of the Cross-Domain Interoperability Framework (CDIF).  CDIF is a set of implementation recommendations, based on profiles of common, existing, domain-neutral metadata standards which are aligned to work together to support core functions required by FAIR.

In this session, we will present these outcomes from the WorldFAIR project and discuss its continuation in a broad set of aligned projects.  Most importantly past, present and potential case studies will present their work and discuss the implications for research infrastructures and the issues outlined above.

Speakers include:

Simon Hodson, WorldFAIR+ and the Cross-Domain Interoperability Framework

Tim Rawling & Rebecca Farrington, Combining Data Across the Spheres

Lesley Wyborn, FAIR and OneGeochemistry

Adrian Burton, People Research Data Commons

And more to be confirmed soon

This session will also include:

Discussion of the implications for Research Infrastructures

Workshop activity: exercise around the challenges and opportunities for Research Infrastructures.  How do RIs support data engineering and the FAIR principles and what investments are needed?

If you are already attending ICRI, the link below will show you how to register via our event portal