Advancing cross-disciplinary FAIR data practices: Harmonization, assessment, and continuous improvement in Geo-INQUIRE

It is widely acknowledged that ‘putting FAIRness into practice’ with respect to cross-disciplinary data sharing demands overcoming domain-specific practices regarding data dissemination.  I.e., communities may rely on specialized standards for describing and sharing data (metadata, vocabularies, services) that do not always easily allow for successful reuse in other domains and may as such not be directly fitted for cross-disciplinary research. In the Geo-INQUIRE project (https://www.geo-inquire.eu/) the European ESFRI landmark research infrastructures EPOS, EMSO, and ECCSEL, the Center of Excellence ChEESE, and the ARISE infrasound community collaborate in overcoming cross-domain barriers, especially the land-sea-atmosphere environments, thereby exploiting innovative data management techniques. As such, one of the strategic priorities of the project is to ‘enhance FAIRness of all data and data products’ for the research infrastructures involved. This concerns not merely a one-time application of the FAIR principles as far as possible, but also measuring the impact for research communities through the establishment of a feedback loop and the measurement of appropriate performance indicators which must be taken from a feasible metrics framework for FAIRness. This approach allows for a constant improvement of data and data products from the FAIR perspective.

The challenges that follow from this ambition are three-fold: 1) In the light of the variety of specialized sub-communities there is the demand to decide about the distinction of intermediate levels for harmonization of metadata, vocabularies, and services design; 2) An instrument is required to perform the actual assessment on the basis of the adopted FAIR metrics framework (thereby following the harmonized standards at the appropriate level), and which must be ready for use by data and/or installation managers; 3) A feedback loop must be configured to support the monitoring of impact and improvement with respect to FAIRness.

To meet these challenges within Geo-INQUIRE we used valuable outcomes from external initiatives (e.g., FAIRsFAIR, GoFAIR). For the FAIR assessment we developed the Geo-INQUIRE FAIRness Assessment Pipeline, a system that evaluates the FAIRness of multiple datasets over time by means of the F-UJI tool in the background, while providing a GUI to analyze the results through multiple dimensions and levels of classification (e.g. discipline). Evaluation over time tracks improvement in a quantitative manner and provides a powerful instrument for creating increased awareness.

For the process of community harmonization at the appropriate intermediate levels we turned to the use of FAIR Implementation Profiles (FIPs). The results we share offer an interesting example of an approach that could easily be transferred to many different cross-disciplinary contexts.