D4.6 - Use case driven validation of semantic artefact exploitation within data repositories

Semantic artifacts (SAs) such as terminologies, taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, and metadata schemas are critical for standardising data representation and documentation, by encapsulating the meaningful knowledge within interoperability frameworks. WP4 “gathers, synthesises and disseminates the materials needed to federate the approach to metadata and ontologies at various organisational and technical levels within EOSC”.  It reviews and analyses semantic artefact (SA) community practices and governance models within use cases, with the aim to explore SA management, sharing practices for data FAIRification, practices which are important for any data-driven sciences. 

This document reports the work of Task 4.5 on FAIR semantic artefacts in use within data repositories through nine use cases, which aim is to demonstrate the impact of FAIR SAs for (meta)data repositories. The common objective is to facilitate and encourage the use of SAs to describe and index data. To achieve this objective, discipline specific SAs catalogues are used to give access to semantically grounded, unambiguous controlled terms. The implemented solution is an API-based connector between the (meta)data repositories and the SAs catalogues (SACs) which allows data depositors to select terms from selected, relevant SAs to fill in metadata with controlled values. The use of a connector  understandably benefits the data repository end users by respectively facilitating metadata filling and improving indexation quality, compared to free text values. The innovation brought by the connector profits in particular managers by preventing them from manipulating SAs (import/export, format transformation) and ensuring that their content is automatically updated. Additionally, end users gain from improved metadata quality and indexing ease.

This document gathers the description of each UC and a short report of their work on connecting a SAC and a (meta)data repository. It also aims at highlighting a set of recommendations to future implementers of a connector, based on the UC experience:

• Identify SA and SAC capabilities of the community to meet the semantic needs in (meta)data repositories and catalogues. 
• The organisation responsible for the SAs governance needs to be sustainable and responsive to users feedback.
• Connectors’ implementation induces changes in (meta)data repositories to exploit SAs potential through adapted search modalities and user interfaces.
• Consider users’ feedback at all stages of the connectors’ development.
• Take into account that the connection between SACs and (meta)data repositories impacts the ecosystem by bringing new interdependencies between information systems.