Documenting mapping community practices

Semantic artefacts - a broader term to include ontologies, terminologies, taxonomies, thesauri, vocabularies, metadata schema and standards - are key to achieving data interoperability.  They are essential to the implementation of the FAIR principles. With the growing number of semantic artefacts and their diversified uses, interconnecting these artefacts becomes critical but challenging. One approach to interoperability and integration is to identify/generate mappings/crosswalks between different artefacts of the same domain or the same type of information. Although known as ontology matching or ontology alignment, it can be applied to the whole spectrum of semantic artefacts. 

We need a strategy to deal with mappings and to ensure mappings are made available following the FAIR principles in relevant mapping repositories where they can be curated, integrated and rendered for use. 

FAIR-IMPACT is holding a series workshops to discuss issues around mappings and crosswalks and how they can become shareable and reusable, i.e. FAIR, elevating them to "first class" citizens in the FAIR data world.

In our 1st workshop of the series, 'Why Mappings Matter and how to make them FAIR?', we introduced participants to the motivation behind doing the mappings and how they could benefit even more by making mappings FAIR including methodologies, formats, tools, and requirements for FAIR mappings and examples. 

A follow up series of workshops aims at investigating existing and established and popular mapping methodologies and processes used by communities from their creation to their maintenance. From these different methodologies and processes, we should be able to determine a common process that could be shared with communities willing to start with their mapping process. One final objective is to write a FAIR cookbook recipes to share openly these methodologies. In this second workshop, common components in the mapping process from the various communities which were identified.