The FAIR Cookbook is an online resource that delivers content (“recipes”) to help users make and keep data FAIR, with a specific focus on FAIR in the Life Sciences. It is intended to provide hands-on, technical step-by-step examples for an effective FAIRification journey. Ramon Granell, Data Manager and Research Software Engineer at FAIRsharing, has led a team that has fully integrated FAIRsharing links into every recipe using a combination of computational tasks and manual curation.
In the FAIR Cookbook, each recipe contains information on the levels and indicators of FAIRness, the maturity model, the technologies, the tools and the standards available, as well as the skills required, and the challenges to achieve and improve data FAIRness. Part of the ELIXIR ecosystem, and recommended by funders, the FAIR Cookbook is also open to contributions of new recipes. Each recipe begins with a summary recipe card, as is shown in the beginning of the recipe “Introduction to terminologies and ontologies” below.
The description of the recipes commonly contains references to many other scientific resources, e.g. databases, standards, policies, and collections.
At FAIRsharing we thought that it would be great to connect these recipes with all possible links to FAIRsharing. For this reason, the FAIRsharing developers and curators perform a semi-automatic process to create these links:
- Automatic matching of recipe content to search for potential matches of FAIR Cookbook resources to FAIRsharing records. This is performed using text matching of all the words in the recipe with specific fields for FAIRsharing records: name, shortname and homepage.
- From the list of potential matches (more than 1,600), a manual checking process is performed to confirm true matches. In addition, the recipe is also quickly checked to see if there are missing matches.
- A box with all the FAIRsharing links is included at the end of each recipe. For some recipes there are already some links to other external resources (RDMkit and Pistoia Alliance). Then we have included the FAIRsharing links in a similar way adding a FAIRsharing box as it can be seen for recipe https://faircookbook.elixir-europe.org/content/recipes/findability/identifiers.html and in the figure below
As a result of this process a total of 63 recipes have been automatically modified to include the links with FAIRsharing records. 582 connections between FAIRsharing and the FAIR Cookbook have been made across the 63 recipes, which in turn correspond to 210 FAIRsharing records. FAIRsharing and the FAIR Cookbook are key components of the ELIXIR Interoperability Platform (EIP). The tighter integration of these two resources creates greater connections among ELIXIR core resources as part of the growth of the ELIXIR FAIR RDM service and knowledge ecosystem.
