Toward FAIR Semantic Publishing of Research Dataset Metadata in the Open Research Knowledge Graph

TL;DR

This paper introduces a semantic framework within the Open Research Knowledge Graph to improve the discoverability and FAIRness of research dataset metadata by integrating dataset descriptions with scholarly publications.

Contribution

It proposes the ORKG-Dataset content type, a standardized semantic model for research datasets linked with publications, enhancing transparency and discoverability.

Findings

Semantic model applied to 40 research datasets

Improved dataset discoverability through FAIR principles

Enhanced integration of datasets with scholarly publications

Abstract

Search engines these days can serve datasets as search results. Datasets get picked up by search technologies based on structured descriptions on their official web pages, informed by metadata ontologies such as the Dataset content type of schema.org. Despite this promotion of the content type dataset as a first-class citizen of search results, a vast proportion of datasets, particularly research datasets, still need to be made discoverable and, therefore, largely remain unused. This is due to the sheer volume of datasets released every day and the inability of metadata to reflect a dataset's content and context accurately. This work seeks to improve this situation for a specific class of datasets, namely research datasets, which are the result of research endeavors and are accompanied by a scholarly publication. We propose the ORKG-Dataset content type, a specialized branch of the Open Research Knowledge Graoh (ORKG) platform, which provides descriptive information and a semantic model for research datasets, integrating them with their accompanying scholarly publications. This work aims to establish a standardized framework for recording and reporting research datasets within the ORKG-Dataset content type. This, in turn, increases research dataset transparency on the web for their improved discoverability and applied use. In this paper, we present a proposal -- the minimum FAIR, comparable, semantic description of research datasets in terms of salient properties of their supporting publication. We design a specific application of the ORKG-Dataset semantic model based on 40 diverse research datasets on scientific information extraction.