The WorldFAIR Project

In the WorldFAIR project, CODATA (the Committee on Data of the International Science Council) and RDA (the Research Data Alliance) work with a set of 11 disciplinary and cross-disciplinary case studies to advance implementation of the FAIR principles and, in particular, to improve interoperability and reusability of digital research objects, including data. Particular attention is paid to the articulation of an interoperability framework for each case study and research domain.

WorldFAIR disciplinary and cross disciplinary case studies

The core of the WorldFAIR project are the 11 case studies, which represent a wide range of sciences, communities and challenges, with global geographical coverage. Each of the case studies are described below, with links to the relevant items, documents, people, and organisations related to their work.

FAIR Implementation profiles (FIPs)

FAIR Implementation Profiles (FIPs) are a methodology, developed by GO FAIR, through which a research community expresses its practices and decisions around FAIR. The WorldFAIR project is exploring FIPs with our 11 case studies: FIPs are developed by each case study early in the project and towards the end of the project.

CROSS-DOMAIN INTEROPERABILITY FRAMEWORK

The Cross-Domain Interoperability Framework (CDIF) is an emerging idea for a set of guidelines around domain-agnostic standards for supporting the implementation of interoperability and reusability of FAIR data, especially across domain- and institutional boundaries. WorldFAIR sets out to test and refine CDIF with the WorldFAIR case studies.

FAIR ASSESSMENT

The reports and recommendations from each WorldFAIR Case Study will be synthesized to develop discipline-sensitive recommendations for FAIR assessment and benchmarks. The Case Studies and the information gathered from the FIPs allows WorldFAIR to make recommendations to EOSC and others involved in the development and implementation of FAIR assessment tools.

Project Outputs

Management (WP1) & Synthesis (WP2)

WorldFAIR First Policy Brief (D1.3)
In this policy brief the WorldFAIR project makes seven policy recommendations relevant to EOSC. Evidence and analysis is presented for each recommendation. The Policy Brief and recommendations draw on project deliverables and discussions held at workshops including project participants and wider stakeholders.


FAIR Implementation Profiles (FIPs) in WorldFAIR: What Have We Learnt? (D2.1)
This report gives an overview of the experience of the WorldFAIR project in using FAIR Implementation Profiles (FIPs). It describes the project, its objectives and its rich set of Case Studies; and it introduces FIPs as a methodology for listing the FAIR implementation decisions made by a given community of practice.

Chemistry (WP3)

Digital Recommendations For Chemistry FAIR Data Policy And Practice (D3.1)
This report reviews some of the critical and persistent issues around documentation of chemical information. It also considers documentation requirements to achieve FAIR sharing of chemistry data in ways that are Reliable, Interpretable, Processable, and Exchangeable (RIPE), and with minimal loss of quality.


WorldFAIR Training Package: FAIR Chemistry Cookbook (D3.2)
The purpose of this deliverable is to develop a digital web resource that will support various user groups in the chemical sciences and allied fields with training in the FAIR principles and machine-readable chemical data. This “Cookbook” serves as a toolbox of interactive recipes for implementing FAIR at various levels and for various user experience levels, ranging from educators who need demonstration resources for instruction, to students who learn by doing, to practitioners who need a quick orientation on a tool or resource.


Utility services for Chemistry Standards (D3.3)
This deliverable aims to describe criteria for web-based services that participating organisations can implement based on their existing and/or preferred technologies (e.g., toolkits, programming languages). The services are intended to confirm chemical identity and provide real time feedback on the machine-readability of chemical data and metadata representations based on IUPAC standard rule sets and community best practices. The goal is to support a range of stakeholders engaging in chemical data exchange online. The initial specification focuses on resolving chemical entities and validating chemical structure representations.

Nanomaterials (WP4)

Nanomaterials Domain-Specific FAIRification Mapping (D4.1)
This deliverable presents the initial FAIR implantation Profile (FIP) which describes the current state of the field (an ‘As-Is’ FIP) and discusses the domain-specific challenges relating to nanomaterials and its FAIR landscape. It then lays out the developments needed to reach the ‘To-Be’ FIP, as the optimal approach to make nanomaterials and nanosafety data FAIR, based on current best practice.


WorldFAIR FAIRification of nanoinformatics tools and models recommendations (D4.2)
This WorldFAIR Deliverable report presents a set of recommendations and prototypes for FAIRification of nanoinformatics tools and models. It is focused on FAIRification of nanoinformatics tools and software primarily, addressing also FAIRIfication of the underpinning (and resulting) datasets. Organisation of the datasets into ready-for-modelling formats, for example via NanoPharos, and use of KNIME nodes to integrate the datasets directly into the modelling software, and the resulting predictions and validation statistics back into the database for further re-use are also emphasised.


WorldFAIR Nanomaterials prototype (Milestone)
This Milestone (MS11) outlines a prototype implementation of support tools to allow FAIR data generation throughout various stages of the data production and management workflow in nanomaterials science using the FAIR maturity indicators as guiding principles.

Geochemistry (WP5)

Formalisation of OneGeochemistry (D5.1)
WorldFAIR Geochemistry sets out to formalise the OneGeochemistry Initiative. With the exponential growth of data volumes and production, better coordination and collaboration is needed within the Earth and Planetary Science community producing geochemical data.


Geochemistry Scientific Content Component (Milestone)
This Milestone describes progress towards developing a methodology designed to assist in defining the individual FERs required to fully describe the minimum scientific and technical variables used to describe any geochemical analysis. It discusses progress towards minimum common variables of samples and how to make best practices for geochemical methods available online. It specifies a set of vocabularies published to describe methodologies.

Social Surveys (WP6)

Cross-national social sciences survey FAIR implementation case studies (D6.1)
Overview of data harmonisation practices of cross-national social surveys through case studies of the European Social Survey and the Australian Social Survey International – European Social Survey. Comparison of the practices between the organisations responsible for the data management of ESS and AUSSI-ESS.


Cross-national Social Sciences survey best practice guidelines (D6.2)
A proposed workflow for the processing of data harmonisation of social surveys, that takes account of the practical steps required to bring diverse content together in a machine-actionable way, and that could best take advantage of external registered, persistent content. This workflow considers the core steps involved in the harmonisation process, key issues that occur in the processing of data during this process, and potential resolutions of these issues. These resolutions are all oriented towards improving FAIR practices in the harmonisation process – through the use of reusable, accessible metadata structures that can both improve processing consistency for current projects, and be applied to future harmonisation projects.


WorldFAIR Pilot Testing Harmonisation Workflows (D6.3)
This report picks up from the previous two to test out proof-of-concept implementations of the workflows outlined in the second WP report, to trial the use of standardised workflows based on registry services available at the Australian Data Archive (ADA) and Sikt through their respective Colectica registries. The workflow steps are piloted with another comparative social survey, the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), to evaluate the Cross-Cultural Survey Harmonisation workflow as a suitable process for machine-to-machine based survey harmonisation.  

Population Health (WP7)

Population Health Data Implementation Guide (D7.1)
This implementation guide describes the way all aspects of the data are made available for use, both within and from outside the INSPIRE Network community, using standard metadata to describe the data. This is an exploration of how generic standards can be used to express the agreed community metadata set.


Population health resource library and training package (D7.2)
This deliverable provides an introduction to the processes involved in making population health data FAIR in a pipeline that spans data collection through data analysis into an SDMX indicators database, and gives seven tutorials on what is needed at each step in this pipeline.  It outlines the need to describe the study and the study context, how to use DDI Codebook and DDI Lifecycle with study data and how to use repositories like GitHub to make the metadata available. The next tutorials describe the extract-transform-load (ETL) process for putting the data into an OMOP CDM and the role of JSON-LD in preparing the data for machine searching in Schema.org in line with DDI-CDI.

Urban Health (WP8)

Urban Health Data – Guidelines And Recommendations (D8.1)
This report assessed the implementation of FAIR principles within the Urban Health field through two case studies. Then it focuses on the data collection and harmonisation process of health survey data. This allowed the elaboration of consensus on terminologies and procedures that facilitates the use of survey health data in cities for research and action.


Urban Health Data: Learning and training workshop (Milestone)
The present Milestone (WorldFAIR MS 12) provides information about the course for which the training materials were developed.  The materials used in the workshop are available here. The materials will be further developed and refined through a consultation workshop and presented in D8.2 as the final version of the training materials and the documentation guidelines.

Biodiversity (WP9)

Data Standard For Sharing Ecological And Environmental Monitoring Data Documented For Community Review (D9.1)
This report describes the FAIR data model being developed in WorldFAIR with GBIF leading a community collaboration.  GBIF’s engagement with the biodiversity community has led to a new draft core Unified Model, developed in collaboration with the Biodiversity Information Standards Group (TDWG) and through community consultation.


Community consultation and finalisation of Biodiversity FAIR data impact: Final data model and training materials completed and shared (D9.2)
Facilitated via WorldFAIR, GBIF’s engagement with the biodiversity community has led to this Deliverable – a new community-approved data standard that has progressed through a long community-led process. This work promotes cross-domain interaction as the Unified Data Model will enhance sharing of data in related Work Packages such as Agricultural Biodiversity, Oceans, and Geochemistry.

Agricultural Biodiversity (WP10)

Agriculture-related pollinator data standards use cases report (D10.1)
This report presents an overview of projects, good practices, tools, and examples for creating, managing and sharing data related to plant-pollinator interactions, along with a work plan for conducting pilots in the next phase of the WorldFAIR Project WP10.


WorldFAIR Agricultural Biodiversity Standards, Best Practices and Guidelines Recommendations (D10.2)
This report presents the results from the pilot phase of the Case Study, which involved six pilot studies adopting standards and recommendations from the discovery phase. The pilots enabled the handling of concrete examples and the generation of reusable materials tailored to this domain, as well as providing better estimates for the overall costs of adoption for future projects.


WorldFAIR Agricultural Biodiversity Standards, Best Practices and Guidelines Recommendations (D10.2): Tutorial
The aim of this tutorial is to facilitate the standardisation of any spreadsheet containing plant-pollinator interaction data, and sharing the final product in the REBIPP platform. Plant-pollinator databases may differ considerably in the level of detail of the information they contain and in how this information is presented, but we expect that every user will be able to standardise their own data by reproducing some of the steps detailed herein.

Ocean Science & Sustainable Development (WP11)

An assessment of the ocean data priority areas for development and implementation roadmap (D11.1)
An evaluation of FAIR Implementation Profiles and FAIR Enabling Resources compiled from WorldFAIR case studies. It synthesises insights obtained through a survey and identifies a pathway to implement sustainable cross-domain (meta)data flows to inform and support the current development of the CDIF.


New interoperability specifications and policy recommendations (D11.2)
This deliverable introduces a set of (meta)data interoperability specifications and recommendations for policies that would ensure their meaningful implementation and development within projects such as WorldFAIR and frameworks such as the Cross-Domain Interoperability Framework (CDIF). This is a concrete step towards interoperable regional and global data spaces (in the terms technical and accurate sense) using domain and regionally neutral interoperability conventions. This is essential to power the emerging integrative, AI-augmented ecosystems such as digital twins, cloud-native solutions, and virtualisation engines.

Disaster Risk Reduction (WP12)

Disaster Risk Reduction Case Study Report (D12.1)
This report describes the types of data used for disaster risk reduction (DRR) and provides two country case studies, for Fiji and Sudan, with an in-depth look at the DRR datasets and associated metadata used by each country. These datasets were assessed against 15 FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data metrics to identify which elements of FAIR were met.


Disaster Risk Reduction Domain-specific FAIR vocabularies (D12.2)
This report explores the use of vocabularies in the DRR domain and how controlled vocabularies coupled with ontologies can enhance the semantic value of DRR data thereby improving interoperability. Enhancing semantic interoperability would result in improved collaboration and communication within the DRR domain and facilitate collaborations with other scientific domains. The final sections of the report provide examples of the use of remote sensing data and AI for DRR.

Cultural Heritage (WP13)

Cultural Heritage Mapping Report: Practices and Policies supporting Cultural Heritage image sharing platforms
Outline of current practices guiding online digital image sharing by institutions charged with providing care and access to cultural memory, in order to identify how these practices may be adapted to promote and support the FAIR principles for data sharing.


Cultural Heritage image sharing recommendations report
This report builds on our understanding of what it means to support FAIR in the sharing of image data derived from GLAM collections. This report looks at previous efforts by the sector towards FAIR alignment and presents 5 recommendations designed to be implemented and tested at the DRI that are also broadly applicable to the work of the GLAMs.