[CODATA-international] A terminology for FAIR Stewardship Skills Workshop: CODATA, Paris, 20-21 May 2019

[Asha CODATA]

On 20-21 May 2019, representatives of the research data community met at
the CODATA <http://www.codata.org/> headquarters in Paris to take the first
steps in building a terminology to describe FAIR
<https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201618> stewardship skills (the
skills necessary to make data FAIR and keep them FAIR): the tag
#terms4FAIRskills
<https://twitter.com/search?q=%23terms4FAIRskills&src=tyah> was used on
Twitter during the event.

*Why is this important?*

There have been a number of efforts to develop training materials and to
list the competencies required for data stewardship. Building on these
previous efforts, the participants of the workshop took the first steps
towards creating a formalised terminology describing competencies, skills
and knowledge associated with activities involved in making data FAIR. When
mature, this will have a variety of use cases, including:

   - to assist with the creation and assessment of stewardship curricula;
   - to help facilitate the annotation, discovery and evaluation of
   FAIR-enabling materials (e.g. for training) and resources;
   - to allow the formalisation of job descriptions and CVs with recognised
   competencies.

The completed terminology will be of use to trainers who teach FAIR data
skills, researchers who want to identify skills gaps in their teams and
middle and senior managers who wish to recruit individuals to relevant
roles.

During the workshop we defined the methodology
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mnyIUo1Zx9hUftvkJQnOZlNUnzslezZb/view?usp=sharing>
we
will use to build this terminology, and reviewed the use cases (how this
terminology will be used in practice), which had been determined via a
survey <https://github.com/hughshanahan/FAIRTerminologySurveyAnalysis>. The
use cases will ultimately drive the decision on the type of formal
representation we will iteratively build (i.e. a controlled vocabulary, a
taxonomy, a thesaurus or an ontology). We started the process by reviewing
descriptions of FAIR skills provided by FAIR4S
<https://eoscpilot.eu/content/d75-strategy-sustainable-development-skills-and-capabilities>,
including their derived ‘compound terms’ and definitions, as well as the
related terms and started the process of building simpler terms (referred
to as ‘atomic terms’) from this.

*What next?*

We will work in groups, collaborating online, to continue to add terms,
decompose them into atomic terms, refine and provide term definitions. A
coordination group will work to clean up and harmonize the list of terms
for consistency. We plan to hold a second workshop in September-November
2019 and - informed by the use cases and competency questions - we will
start to identify and build the necessary formal representation. Before
that workshop, we intend to release some basic documentation about the work
and the draft list of terms and definitions.

*How to get involved*

We welcome additional collaborators in this activity. If you would like to
become involved with this project or would like some clarification, please
contact the Organizers at terms4FAIRskills at codata.orgspecifying your name,
institutional affiliation and the ways in which you would like to
contribute.

*Who is involved in #terms4FAIRskills?*

A committee of representatives* from CODATA, the DCC, DTL/ELIXIR-NL,
FAIRsharing and Royal Holloway organised the 1st workshop which brought
together a number of experts in FAIR data, data skills training and
Knowledge Engineering, from projects and organisations from across Europe.

Workshop announcement: https://terms4fairskills.github.io/Announcement.html



CODATA activities to coordinate development of data science and data
stewardship curricula: http://www.codata.org/fair-data-training



Thanks,

Asha

-- 

___________________________



Asha Law | Program Assistant, CODATA | http://www.codata.org



E-Mail: asha at codata.org

Tel (Office): +33 1 45 25 04 96



CODATA (Committee on Data of the International Council for Science), 5 rue
Auguste Vacquerie, 75016 Paris, FRANCE
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