M4.4 - Review of Semantic Artefact Catalogues and guidelines for serving FAIR semantic artefacts in EOSC

In the rapidly evolving landscape of scientific research, the proliferation of ontologies and semantic artefacts necessitates the development of robust systems to manage and utilise these resources effectively. Semantic Artefact Catalogues (SAC) and ontology repositories are critical in this regard, especially within the framework of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) that has clearly identified the important role “ontologies and metadata” may have on the construction of a Web of FAIR data and services. These catalogues provide essential platforms for receiving, hosting, serving, aligning, and enabling the reuse of ontologies and other Semantic Artefacts (SA) (terminologies, taxonomies, thesauri, vocabularies, metadata schemas and standards). These catalogues not only facilitate the organisation and access of semantic artefacts but also support and sometime ensure their compliance with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) Data Principles, which are foundational to the EOSC’s mission of promoting open science and data sharing across diverse scientific disciplines. 

Semantic artefact catalogues essentially help their users to discover, manipulate, explore and exploit SAs without the need to manage or develop them. The types of SACs build by various (scientific but not only) communities ranges from simple semantic artefact listings to rich libraries with structured metadata, and advanced repositories (or portals) that offer a variety of services for multiple types of semantic artefacts,. These services may include browsing/searching, visualisation, metrics, recommendations, and annotation of data. SAC are often developed or maintained by specific discipline communities or infrastructures and we have seen the emergence of specific generic technologies –such as OntoPortal, SKOSMOS or OLS– that can be reused to deploy new semantic artefact catalogues.

Within FAIR-IMPACT’s WP4 on ontologies and metadata, T4.2 aims to establish guidelines and community practices with respect to the lifecycle of FAIR semantic artefacts from creation (T4.2.1) to sharing and reuse via catalogues or repositories (T4.2.2) and standardisation of SA metadata descriptions and SAC application programming interfaces. WP4 has already produced multiple deliverables showing the importance of SACs in the governance of semantic artefacts (M4.1, D4.1) and in their FAIR lifecycle (M4.2). 

In this Milestone, we explore the current landscape of SACs, in EOSC and beyond; we make a quite comprehensive review of current and past SACs, sorting them by types, disciplines and technology. Plus, based on the five methodologies and tools for FAIRness assessment of SAs, available thru FAIR-IMPACT’s partners (O’FAIRe, FOOPS!, FsF, 10-SR and FVF) we have regrouped 10 important dimensions for FAIR semantic artefacts and we study how much each reviewed SAC enables or supports FAIR for their artefacts. The Milestone provides a good overview of how SACs can help SAs to address FAIR principles and contribute to the efficient management and utilisation of SAs.

The Milestone consists of the current report presenting our methodology and result analysis as well as associated data under the form of a spreadsheet which contains the listing of SACs, their classifications (status, type, discipline, technology) and the evaluation of their FAIR-enabling dimensions. The spreadsheet discussed and analysed in the current report is versioned with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.12799862