FAIR Digital Objects (FDOs) are emerging as a promising generic approach to solving the interoperability problem of linking data from different domains. However, there is a lack of a widely accepted technical specification of the concept as well as community-driven show cases.
The Working Group on Semantics (FDO-SEM), launched by Peter Mutschke in the context of the emerging FDO Forum (http://fairdo.org), is addressing the problem of the still largely missing semantic model for FDOs. On June 1, the kick-off workshop of the Working Group took place with international participation. This group continues the work started in the realm of GO FAIR and addresses the semantic model of FDOs as well as the semantic interoperability between data, to help breaking down data silos. Semantic interoperability is especially needed when it comes to linking heterogenous data from different communities in a machine-actionable way, especially in the context of cross-disciplinary research.
During the FAIR Festival from June 21-23, FDO-SEM hosted a well-attended session on FDOs together with the GO FAIR Implementation Network on "Cross-Domain Interoperability (GO Inter)", also coordinated by Peter Mutschke. The session identified well-scaling models for FDOs at different levels of granularity as well as convincing show cases as the most urgent desiderata.