Research Ideas and Outcomes :
Conference Abstract
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Corresponding author: Barbara Magagna (barbara@gofair.foundation)
Received: 27 Aug 2022 | Published: 12 Oct 2022
© 2022 Erik Schultes, Barbara Magagna, Tobias Kuhn, Marek Suchánek, Luiz Bonino da Silva Santos, Barend Mons
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Schultes EA, Magagna B, Kuhn T, Suchánek M, Bonino da Silva Santos LO, Mons B (2022) The Comparative Anatomy of Nanopublications and FAIR Digital Objects. Research Ideas and Outcomes 8: e94150. https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.8.e94150
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Beginning in 1995, early Internet pioneers proposed Digital Objects as encapsulations of data and metadata made accessible through persistent identifier resolution services (
Beginning in 2009, nanopublications were independently conceived (
Like nanopublication, the FDOF also posits an ultra-minimal approach to structured, self-contained, machine-readable data and metadata. An FDO consists of: the object itself (subsequently referred to here as the resource to avoid confusion with other meanings of the term “object”); the metadata describing the resource; and a globally unique and persistent identifier with predictable resolution behaviors.
These two technologies share the same vision of a data infrastructure, and act as instances of Machine-Actionable Containers (MACs) that make use of minimal uniform standards to enable FAIR operations. Here, we compare the structure and computational behaviors of the existing nanopublication infrastructure, to those in the proposed FAIR Digital Object Framework. Although developed independently there are clear parallels between the vision and the approach of nanopublication and FDOF. Each aspires to minimal standards for the encapsulation of digital information into free-standing, publishable (citable, referenceable) entities. The minimal standards involve globally unique and persistent identifiers that resolve to standardized semantically enabled metadata descriptions that include machine actionable paths to the resource itself.
At the same time, there are also differences. The scope of nanopublications is limited to the assertional data type and, as the name suggests, nanopublications should remain small in size (limited to single assertions as individual triples or small RDF graphs). In contrast FDOs are unlimited in their scope, accommodating digital resources of arbitrarily large size, type and complexity, so long as their type can be ontologically described. Furthermore, whereas nanopublications represent a moderately mature technology, the FDOF is a specification still under development. If it were possible to formally draw points of contact between the two approaches, then it would be possible to leverage the vast practical experience gained in the nanopublishing of assertions for the FDO community.
Here, inspired by recent applications of nanopublications in the FIP Wizard tool (
FAIR Principles, Nanopublication, Nanopublication Ecosystem, Machine-Actionable Containers, FIP Wizard, FAIR Wizard of Leiden
Erik Anthony Schultes
First International Conference on FAIR Digital Objects, presentation