FAIR to Enable Cross-Domain Research

The major global scientific and human challenges of the 21st century (including climate mitigation and adaptation, environmental sustainability, biodiversity and ecosystem management, disaster risk reduction, the interplay of society, the economy and energy policy) can only be addressed through cross-domain research that seeks to understand complex systems through machine-assisted analysis at scale.  Our capacity for such analysis is currently constrained by the limitations in our ability to access and combine heterogenous data within and across domains.  The FAIR principles and the frameworks set by Open Science provide a significant part of the solution.  Attention needs to be paid to the interfaces where data is used between disciplines: the geosciences have a vital role to play in this work.

To help address these issues, CODATA has been entrusted by the International Science Council (ISC) to develop a programme of activity: ‘Making Data Work for Cross-Domain Grand Challenges’.  After some exploratory work, the flagship activity is the WorldFAIR project which focuses on the implementation of the FAIR principles both within and across 11 different domain and cross-domain case studies, with a central effort to understand and guide cross-domain FAIR. It is the first broad-based effort to understand the issues around cross-domain and cross-infrastructure FAIR implementation through a case study driven methodology. Ultimately, WorldFAIR will provide guidance for FAIR implementation both within specific domains and infrastructures and across them.  The necessity, affordances and opportunities for cross-domain research are often overlooked, partly due to entrenched academic disciplines.  This presentation will outline a number of concrete examples of work to advance cross-domain interoperability of relevance to the geosciences community.

The I and the R of FAIR pose considerable challenges but are fundamental to addressing complex issues where datasets need to be combined and in enhancing scientific rigour and reproducibility.  Consequently, increasing attention is being paid to semantics, the maintenance of referenceable vocabularies and ontologies and to metadata profiles—and to tools that facilitate the tracking of provenance and process, or that use variable level metadata and semantics to facilitate data integration.  The semantics of space are particularly important in data linking and combination.  WorldFAIR is also developing the Cross-Domain Interoperability Framework (CDIF) which identifies a set of functional requirements for interoperability, particularly for steps in data combination, and recommends good practices for each of these requirements, in relation to the use of existing or emerging standards and specifications.  The CDIF is categorically not a new standard, but is intended to act as a lingua franca across domain data practices and encourage the incorporation of a number of standards that perform important and specific functions across domains.  We are keen to test this approach with colleagues from as many disciplines and application areas as possible.

This talk will explore these developments in detail, make a case for the importance of further work on the I and the R of FAIR, and invite the geosciences research community to participate in the wider WorldFAIR initiative.