Practice Abstract - Research and innovation

The FAIRness of data and other ‘knowledge objects’ exchanged in the EU agri-food and rural sectors

Knowledge is a basic ingredient for the creation of new infrastructures, business / policy decisions and many other activities impacting widely upon society. The EU agri-food and rural sectors are gradually entering the digital age by deploying a range of digital technologies that are reshaping the way various activities are performed. However, leveraging the full power of knowledge requires it to be conveyed in ways that make its exploitation feasible by both humans and machines.



Delivering quality data is a requisite for opening up new opportunities in the agri-food and rural sectors. Presently, most EU-funded multi-actor research and innovation projects (MAPs) create massive volumes of data and other ‘knowledge objects’ in various formats. However, the quality of this information is inextricably linked to its accessibility which depends upon how Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) it is.



To contribute to this ongoing effort towards distributing quality data, the EUREKA project (www.h2020eureka.eu) undertook a thorough FAIRness investigation of existing MAPs. This showed that only 25-30% of the knowledge objects disseminated by them were created in a way that could be shared and reused due to numerous key issues such as the lack of compliance with standards, missing metadata values, and the lack of licensing information instructing specific means of data exploitation.



To address these issues, the EUREKA project proposes the following recommendations for the FAIRness of data delivery by MAPs:



1. Deploy PIDs (Persistent Identifiers);



2. Comply with the minimum set of metadata proposed by EUREKA;



3. Attribute a license to all data/ knowledge objects, and;



4. Deliver a data management plan.

Source Project
Eureka
Completed | 2020-2022
Main funding source
Horizon 2020 (EU Research and Innovation Programme)
Geographical location
Belgium
Project details

Project Keywords