Challenges for Putting FAIR into Practice

Résumé

The understanding is growing that the emerging integrated and interoperable data domain (I2D2) will have far reaching consequences for society, research and economy comparable to the changes caused by the Internet, for example. Such large infrastructures have a global dimension and require global agreements which in general are simple pre-competitive standards. Despite the FAIR Principles and the concept of FAIR Digital Objects (FDO), it seems that we are still far away from agreements on convergent specifications if we for example look at practices in the data labs. In this paper we describe the evolution of the FDO concept and point to the crucial role of global, unique, persistent and resolvable identifiers as basis for FDO.