FAIR-Enabling Services Redux

I have sought to identify and enumerate core FAIR-enabling services. I attempted a five-week experiment to expand on my tentative list, but I did not complete it. The list wasn’t compelling for me.

I have been brewing an updated list of core FAIR-enabling services, which I hope to be less bombastic about. Nevertheless, I want to share with you this list and my thoughts about concretizing them through pedagogically minded demo implementations tied together by a running example that I intend to refine and deploy for a real project.

FAIR-Enabling services:

  1. an identifier minter (e.g. arknoid)
  2. a metadata tracker (e.g. terminusdb)
  3. a metadata transactor (terminusdb schema)
  4. a metadata indexer, to feed a search engine (e.g. elasticsearch)
  5. an identifier metadata resolver (e.g. fastapi with conneg)
  6. a data object retriever (e.g. minio s3 presigned urls)
  7. a metadata harmonizer (e.g. cambria-esque json patch graph)

I’d like to demo a service stack via docker-compose. Some resources I am thinking to consult or leverage directly here are arknoid, TerminusDB, Elasticsearch, FastAPI, MinIO, and Project Cambria.

My intended running example is the incorporation of heliophysics concepts into the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT) and harmonizing that with the OpenAlex concept scheme so that one may evaluate semantics-fueled improvements to query understanding and thus search-result relevance via the OpenAlex dataset. The OpenAlex dataset has value as a testbed for improvements to in-production search engines such as the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System.