Research Ideas and Outcomes :
Conference Abstract
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Corresponding author: Andreas Pfeil (andreas.pfeil@kit.edu)
Received: 02 Sep 2022 | Published: 12 Oct 2022
© 2022 Andreas Pfeil, Thomas Jejkal, Sabrine Chelbi, Nicolas Blumenröhr
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:
Pfeil A, Jejkal T, Chelbi S, Blumenröhr N (2022) A FAIR Digital Object Lab Software Stack. Research Ideas and Outcomes 8: e94408. https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.8.e94408
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Preprocessing data for research, like finding, accessing, unifying or converting, takes up to large parts of research time spans (
FAIR Digital Objects are expressive, machine-actionable pointers to research data (
The creation and maintenance of FAIR DOs is not trivial, as their persistent identifiers (PIDs) contain typed record information. When creating or maintaining PID records of FAIR DOs, the required information has to be validated, involving calls to a public Data Type Registry (DTR) (
We are developing a set of services, offering a solution to support these use-cases, which we call the FAIR DO Lab. Its goal is to have a production-ready and configurable software stack, easing the development of FAIR-DO-aware tools and services by offering at least the described use-cases. We have already gained some experience by its predecessor, the FAIR DO Testbed (
The FAIR DO Lab enables PID record management and validation using the Typed PID Maker (
All created or modified PIDs are communicated to a message broker. This way, other services can be notified about such activities. Our first service making use of this will be an advanced indexing service. It will ingest the PIDs and their record information into a search index, but also try to extract information from the bit-sequence of the digital object itself. In a second step, we are considering the automated creation of collections utilizing our production-ready Collection Registry (
On the conceptual side, we hope to gain more insight about the required structure of PID records. There are ongoing discussions about this structure and to which degree standardization is required. Large talking points are the concepts of Digital Object Types (
On the practical side, the Lab will already have a stronger focus on interactive tools with user interfaces in order to provide an easy-to-use Lab for research. We consider our current work on granular base services for research data management to be a solid ground for such developments. These tools can of course not replace specialized tools, but will make the generic services in the Lab easy to use. We still expect that specialized tools will benefit from the integration of such services.
The FAIR DO Lab development has been supported by the research program ‘Engineering Digital Futures’ of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers and the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration Platform.
FAIR Digital Objects, Tools, Persistent Identifiers, Kernel Information Profiles, Research Environments, Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration Platform (HMC)
Andreas Pfeil
First International Conference on FAIR Digital Objects, presentation