FAIR vocabularies

[Francoise Genova]

Dear all,

You certainly know that there is currently lots of activities at the 
global level about the FAIR guiding principles and definition and 
implementation of FAIR and FAIRness. The I2 FAIR guiding principle 
states that "(Meta)data use vocabularies that follow the FAIR 
principles". The definition what being a "FAIR vocabulary" means is a 
hot topic. I am just now attending two sessions of the FAIR Convergence 
Symposium dealing with the topic. There are also discussions about this 
in the FAIRsFAIR European project and in the RDA.

As discussed in the Data Curation and Preservation IG a few months ago, 
astronomy has been developing its own FAIR practices long before FAIR 
was defined, but now we have to find how to align with emerging rules 
because there is a risk of being excluded from the global data concert 
at some point if we are not compliant enough.

I have the feeling that our vocabularies are not so bad in terms of 
community-driven governance. Once again there is an issue with licence. 
I just asked the question and the answer is that something which is 
openly available on the web cannot be reused if it does not have a 
licence (I have to admit that I was expecting this answer because I got 
the same about data when I asked in in other contexts). A hot debate 
followed my question in the chat about the type of licence and as usual 
nothing is simple in the licence domain. When we discussed licences for 
data the decision of licences was clearly on the data provider side. For 
vocabularies maintained by the IVOA it should be in the hands of the 
Exec but there is a need to do a preliminary assessment before any decision.

There are likely other issues than licences in our practices with 
respect to what emerges in the discussion on the definition of FAIRess 
for vocabularies.

Marco, Francois, Mark and checked the astronomy FAIR practices with 
respect to the FAIR metrics for data defined by the RDA FAIR Data 
Maturity Model. I suggest that we have a look at our vocabularies and 
how we manage them with respect to "FAIR vocabularies".

Cheers

Francoise