The FAIR Digital Objects Forum is a self-organized group of international data experts concerned with the development of a new data infrastructure to foster digital transformation of society. The forum is currently organized in five topical groups addressing different aspects of infrastructure building. Two of our task area leaders are also members of the forum. We are fortunate to have one of the forums founding chairs in our advisory board.
The capitalized acronym FAIR refers to Findable Accessible Interoperable, and Reusable data .
Here is a full technical definition of a FAIR Digital Object:
“A FAIR digital object is a unit composed of data that is a sequence of bits, or a set of sequences of bits, each of the sequences being structured (typed) in a way that is interpretable by one or more computer systems, and having as essential elements an assigned globally uniqueandpersistent identifier (PID), a type definition for the object as a whole and a metadata description (which itself can be another FAIR digital object) of the properties of the object, making the whole findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable both by humans and computers for the reliable interpretation and processing of the data represented by the object.”
In short “A bit sequence with a persistent identifier (pid), metadata and a type”.
(TSIG FDO WG )
Documents
The following key documents have been endorsed by the Forum and are availabe here .
- The Scoping Document describes the scope of the activities of the FDO Forum and its current temporary organisational form.
- The Landscape Document is a snapshot of the current groups active in the FDO Forum and their foci.
- The FDO Framework has been taken over from the Paris workshop discussions and are seen as the baseline for the future specification work.
- The Base FDO Definition document presents a basal definition of what an FDO is.
- A Communication Strategy to describe how the FDO Forum will disseminate its results and engage all stakeholders interested in FDOs.
- A first Gap Analysis presents a snapshot describing what still needs to be done to come to a fully functional FDO based infrastructure and will enable defining roadmaps.