Want to know which object types are available? Head over to our Gitbook pages, and then come back here for more information!
FAIR evaluation, assessment and assistance is a growth area. At least 30 tools have been developed to help users understand how to achieve a state of FAIRness for their digital research objects (DOs), and how that FAIRness can be measured (assessed and/or evaluated) and improved. However, claims such as “my data is FAIR” or my “repository enables FAIR data” cannot currently be trusted, due to the wide variety ways in which FAIR can — and should — be implemented. This makes the use of these tools challenging. One of those challenges is that many tools can test only a limited set of DO types. For example, the FAIR Champion (formerly FAIR Evaluator) and F-UJI tools are primarily aimed at testing traditional datasets stored in repositories; the OpenAIRE Validator focuses on content providers such as repositories; FOOPS! is intended to test semantic artefacts like ontologies; and howfairis is designed to test software.
FAIRsharing, as a registry of standards, databases and policies, is perfectly placed to store the information regarding the types of object(s) these resources support. Therefore we have added a new Object type field to every record within FAIRsharing. There are 16 object types as well as types that can be used when your resource is agnostic of any particular object type.
Have you every wanted to discover a database or standard based on the type of digital research object they are designed to support? FAIRsharing Object types allow you to do exactly this.
This feature is now available in FAIRsharing for all records, and is in the process of being curated across all records. Any newly-curated or newly-created records (other than collections) must have this field completed, or the record will not be approved by our curation team. You can filter by Object type in the facets within our search pages, and also using our Advanced Search.
Object types define the type of digital research object that is in scope for the resource described by a FAIRsharing record. When curating, we ask our maintainers, Champions and staff to use the most precise object tag(s) that accurately reflect the type of digital research object that is in scope for your resource. If your resource is relevant across all types of object, please use the object type agnostic tag only. If your resource contains a type of object not covered by any of the existing tags, please use the other object type tag only.
These object types were developed in collaboration with the community as part of the OSTrails project. One of the activities within this project is to design and implement a framework that is both generic (works for all DO types and is domain-agnostic) and extendable (meets the needs of different DO typologies and disciplines). This common framework will help foster trust in the results they produce, as these tools will become more transparent, technically consistent, and comparable. In order to have a successful framework that works for all DO types, tools must be able to discover FAIR-enabling resources (standards, databases, policies) according to the type of DO that resource was designed to support. Details of the specification of these object types and crosswalks to a number of community terminologies are available in the OSTrails digital object commons repository. The addition of object types within FAIRsharing will allow these tools to discover resources that are relevant to the type of digital object being tested.