D4.2 - FAIR semantic artefact lifecycle from engineering, to sharing

Semantic Artefacts (SAs) is a broad term to designate different knowledge organization systems or semantic resources, including ontologies, terminologies, taxonomies, thesauri, vocabularies and, metadata schemas. SAs are essential for standardising data representation and annotation, encapsulating the highest level of meaningful knowledge within interoperability frameworks. These artefacts are fundamental to sustainable, quality-assured data description practices and they are crucial to follow the FAIR Principles, particularly Interoperability (Principle I.2). Experts, including those involved in the EOSC Interoperability Framework (EOSC-IF), agree that this framework should adopt a bottom-up approach, to take in account insights from different real-world domains. 

This deliverable (D4.2) presents several aspects of SAs lifecycle that are scanned to guide and inspire stakeholders in producing and distributing FAIR semantic artefacts. D4.2 is one of the main deliverables of FAIR-IMPACT’s task T4.2 which aims to establish guidelines and practices related to the FAIR SA’s lifecycle from creation (Subtask 4.2.1 - Semantic artefact engineering, adoption and description) to sharing and reuse via Semantic Artefact Catalogues (SACs) or repositories (Subtask 4.2.2 - Interoperable Semantic Artefact Catalogues). The task also worked to standardise the mechanisms to describe and serve semantic artefacts (Subtask 4.2.3 - Standardised semantic artefact metadata and their catalogue APIs) respectively with MOD (Metadata Ontology Description and Publication) and the MOD-API specification. This document shows the work of T4.2 in embedding the FAIR principles throughout the lifecycle of SAs (Section 2), from their engineering (Section 2.1) to the sharing process (Section 2.2), with a particular focus on SACs. It highlights the interoperability strategies concerning SACs and the actions taken to federate and sustain them (Section 3).