Towards Machine-actionable FAIR Digital Objects with a Typing Model that Enables Operations

TL;DR

This paper presents a new typing model and registry system that enhance the machine-actionability of FAIR Digital Objects, enabling dynamic operations and improving interoperability in research data management.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, technology-agnostic typing model with inheritance and validation features, advancing FAIR Digital Object support for research workflows.

Findings

Enhanced machine-actionability of FAIR Digital Objects.

Integrated Data Type and Operations Registry with inheritance.

Supports dynamic, interoperable research workflows.

Abstract

FAIR Digital Objects support research data management aligned with the FAIR principles. To be machine-actionable, they must support operations that interact with their contents. This can be achieved by associating operations with FAIR-DO data types. However, current typing models and Data Type Registries lack support for type-associated operations. In this work, we introduce a typing model that describes type-associated and technology-agnostic FAIR Digital Object Operations in a machine-actionable way, building and improving on the existing concepts. In addition, we introduce the Integrated Data Type and Operations Registry with Inheritance System, a prototypical implementation of this model that integrates inheritance mechanisms for data types, a rule-based validation system, and the computation of type-operation associations. Our approach significantly improves the machine-actionability of FAIR Digital Objects, paving the way towards dynamic, interoperable, and reproducible research workflows.