A Five-Week Experiment to Elaborate on FAIR-Enabling Services
Yesterday, I proposed that a strategy for implementing the FAIR principles for research data management can focus on ensuring five FAIR-enabling services, which in turn will prompt tactical choices of FAIR-enabling resources that may satisfactorily address each question and thereby produce a comprehensive implementation profile. The purpose of such care in design is to de-risk one’s investment in “going FAIR”, as the cost of systems implementation and maintenance can easily exceed the cost of a design phase by an order of magnitude.
These FAIR-enabling services are, again:
- Identifying
- Validating
- Indexing
- Translating
- Tracing
Other than cursory remarks, I am yet to elaborate in any detail the behavior I expect from these services. I would like to remedy this over the next five weeks, one week per service, in the order given above.
And there is a constraint I would like to impose on myself: each week will be a five-day progression of notes that reflects the service sequence above. For example, during the first week (on Identifying), I will:
On Day 1: Identify the concepts, attributes, and relationships at play in Identifying.
On Day 2: Assert and validate a set of statements, using elements that I identified the day before, that should hold for Identifying.
On Day 3: Demonstrate a process of Indexing the above in order to efficiently retrieve assertions.
On Day 4: Assert relationships among schemes for Identifying, and attempt Translating from one to another.
On Day 5: Demonstrate a process of Tracing revisions made to the metadata that Identifying yields (i.e., what is returned when an identifier is resolved).
Is this five-week planned experiment ambitious? Yes? Is it too ambitious? Almost certainly yes. Will I attempt it anyway? Yes.
Would I appreciate your day-to-day feedback for course correction? Yes. And I would enthusiastically acknowledge your contribution when collecting and clarifying the sum of each week’s notes.