Building a terminology for the skills necessary to make data FAIR and to keep it FAIR.
The terms4FAIRskills project has created a formalised terminology that describes the competencies, skills and knowledge associated with making and keeping data FAIR. This terminology can be used in a variety of use cases, including:
- To assist with the creation and assessment of stewardship curricula;
- To facilitate the annotation, discovery and evaluation of FAIR-enabling materials (e.g. training) and resources;
- To enable the formalisation of job descriptions and CVs with recognised, structured competencies.
terms4FAIRskills is of use to trainers who teach FAIR data skills, researchers who wish to identify skill gaps in their teams and managers who need to recruit individuals to relevant roles.
The GitHub repository for the terminology is available at https://github.com/terms4fairskills/FAIRterminology/
Peter McQuilton
Laura Molloy
Allyson Lister
Yann Le Franc
We are a member of the the OBO Foundry, which builds and supports community-developed ontologies according to the OBO Principles. You can find our Foundry record at https://obofoundry.org/ontology/t4fs.html
We continue to develop terms4FAIRskills and our latest terminology will always be found in our related GitHub repository. New term requests and queries can be posted on our issue tracker.
Currently, T4FS is based on the following model:
terms4FAIRskills sprung out of a community need identified at the GO FAIR Coordination meeting in the January of 2019. Since then, we have hosted two workshops:
The first f2f meeting (Paris, FR May 2019)
The second f2f meeting (The Hague, NL October 2019)
Thanks to our successful EOSC co-creation proposal, we continued to develop the Terms4FAIRskills (T4FS) using two real-life use cases - the CODATA/RDA Summer Schools and the ELIXIR Training Platform Training and Events Portal (TeSS). Through a number of workshops and hackathons, we iteratively annotated a large number of training materials using the Semaphora annotation tool.
Our report on this work can be found on Zenodo at the following DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4705219 and more information on our work during the award can be found on these two blogs:
EOSC Co-creation hackathons (virtual, December 2020)
EOSC Co-creation hackathons (virtual, January 2021)
The annotations made via the Semaphora tool during the hackathons can be found here
The EOSC co-creation award funded three people to work on terms4FAIRskills:
| Name | Institution | Logo |
|---|---|---|
| Yann Le Franc | e-Science Data Factory, France |  |
| Peter McQuilton | FAIRsharing and the University of Oxford, Department of Engineering Science, Oxford, UK |   |
| Laura Molloy | CODATA, the Committee on Data of the International Science Council |  |
and contributions in kind from the following members of the terms4FAIRskills community:
| Name | Institution | Logo |
|---|---|---|
| Hugh Shanahan | Royal Holloway, University of London |  |
| Celia van Gelder | Dutch Techcentre for LIfe Sciences (DTL), ELIXIR-NL |  |
| Susanna-Assunta Sansone | FAIRsharing and the University of Oxford, Department of Engineering Science, Oxford, UK |
|
| Allyson Lister | ||
| Angus Whyte | Digital Curation Centre | 
|
| Kevin Ashley | ||
| Victoria Dominguez Del Angel | Institut Français de Bioinformatique(IFB), ELIXIR-FR |  |
We have presented terms4FAIRskills at a number of conferences, including (but not limited to):
- EOSC Symposium November 2019 (Budapest, Hungary)
- FAIRification Mini Symposium (ELIXIR AHM - virtual) June 2020 (see a video of the ten minute presentation
- EOSC Symposium October 2020 (virtual) (slides)
- CODATA/GO-FAIR Convergence December 2020 (virtual) (slides to come)
The terms4FAIRskills Community
The terms4FAIRskills project is founded and run by a small group of enthusiastic experts who grasp the significance of this work, taken from a variety of backgrounds.
These include or have included CODATA, ELIXIR-EMBL-EBI, ELIXIR-FR, ELIXIR-NL, ELIXIR-UK, EOSC-Life, FAIRsFAIR, FAIRsharing, GO-FAIR, the Digital Curation Centre, the Dutch Centre for Life Science, DANS, Royal Holloway, Leiden University Libraries, The British Library, Oxford University, European University Association, VU Amsterdam, SURF, European Bioinformatics Institute, Australian Research Data Commons and TU Delft.
New collaborators are joining the project all the time. If you are interested in collaborating, please email [email protected] specifying your name, institutional affiliation and how you would like to contribute.
Page updated Feb 2024. Website maintained by Allyson Lister, and previously by Peter McQuilton.