Imperial College London

Henry Rzepa

FAIR is one of those acronyms that spreads rapidly, acquires a life of
its own and can mean many things to different groups. A two-day event
has just been held in
[Amsterdam](https://iupac.org/event/supporting-fair-exchange-chemical-data-standards-development/)
to bring some of those groups from the chemical sciences together to
better understand FAIR. Here I note a few items that caught my
attention.

1.  [Fairsharing.org](http://fairsharing.org/) was the basis for several
    presentations. It serves as "a curated, informative and educational
    resource on data and metadata *standards*, inter-related to
    *databases* and data *policies*." It promotes establishing metrics
    which strive to quantify how FAIR any given resource
    is.\[cite\]10.1038/sdata.2018.118\[/cite\] Any site which achieves a
    good FAIR metric can be described as a FAIR data point (a term new
    to me), and which can serve as an exemplar of what FAIR data aspires
    to.
2.  Intrigued, I offered [this
    page](http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/talks/amsterdam18/2018-1.html)
    and hope to establish its FAIR metric in the near future, if only to
    understand how to improve its "score" so that future pages can be
    improved. It is based on the following
    [Figure](https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Figure-9.pdf)\[cite\]10.1039/c7sc03595k\[/cite\]
    which appeared in a recent article and appears to be a publishing
    "first" in as much as the figure contains hyperlinks directly to the
    data sources upon which it is based. The putative FAIR data point
    takes this a little further by wrapping the figure with
    visualisation tools which take the FAIR data and convert it to
    interactive models with the help of an added toolbox.
3.  Another topic for discussion was spectroscopy and a veritable file
    format for its distribution, JCAMP-DX. One emerging theme is the
    idea of promoting two types of spectral distribution. The first is
    the use of a common standard format (JCAMP-DX) which strives to
    eliminate much of the proprietary character associated with data
    emerging from instruments. At the other extreme is to to offer to
    readers the raw instrumental
    data,\[cite\]10.1039/c7np00064b\[/cite\] which has the advantage of
    having none of the inevitable loss of information when transforming
    to standard formats. The downside is that it almost always can only
    be processed using proprietary software provided by the instrument
    vendor. One way of avoiding this is **Mpublish** (the [topic of an
    earlier blog](https://www.ch.imperial.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/?p=16628))
    and we heard interesting updates on progress from MestreLabs, the
    originators of this procedure. It is still my hope that more vendors
    (both of instruments and of software) will adopt such a model.
4.  A further topic was metadata, which is at the heart of each of the
    terms in FAIR (F = findable, A = accessible, I = interoperable and R
    = re-usable), which are all defined in part at least by the metadata
    associated with any item. The state of metadata associated with
    research data is often dire, and often too little resource has been
    assigned to its improvement. I presented an example of how richer
    metadata might be injected. The below is a snippet of the metadata
    associated with one entry in a data repository (download the
    metadata [here](https://data.datacite.org/application/vnd.datacite.datacite+xml/10.14469/hpc/4546)
    and open the file with a text editor). An advantage of doing this is
    that [rich
    searches](https://search.datacite.org/works?query=(subjectScheme:inchikey+subject:KTOSDSJYNBIDCN-UHFFFAOYSA-N)+(subjectScheme:Gibbs_Energy+subject:-1082.980914))
    against these terms become
    enabled.![](https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Gibbs-1024x351.jpg){.aligncenter
    .size-large .wp-image-19801 loading="lazy" decoding="async"
    width="450" height="154"
    srcset="https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Gibbs-1024x351.jpg 1024w, https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Gibbs-300x103.jpg 300w, https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Gibbs-768x263.jpg 768w, https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Gibbs.jpg 1770w"
    sizes="(max-width: 450px) 100vw, 450px"}
5.  Finally, I note events such as *e.g.* [Harnessing FAIR
    data](http://www.ses.ac.uk/event/harnessing-fair-data/) are starting
    to spring up. This one is at **Queen Mary University of London** on
    3rd September 2018, for which "PhDs and Post Docs from a range of
    disciplines" are welcomed, they of course being the pre-eminent
    generators of  data and often the ones in charge of making it
    "FAIR".

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FAIR is one of those acronyms that spreads rapidly, acquires a life of its own and can mean many things to different groups. A two-day event has just been held in Amsterdam to bring some of those groups from the chemical sciences together to better understand FAIR. Here I note a few items that caught my attention. Fairsharing.org was the basis for several presentations.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

FAIR Data in Amsterdam – FAIR data points.