The FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles [1] have become increasingly important in data management. A number of recommendations has been proposed for making FAIR data1, such as the “FAIR Data Maturity Model” [2]. Best practices for implementing FAIR vocabularies and ontologies on the Web [3, 4] have been also proposed and the evaluation of their degree of FAIRness addressed [5, 6]. Despite this wave of eforts, few attention has been given to producing FAIR ontology alignments. Recently, the EOSC has addressed the problem of “semantic mapping sharing”, reporting on the requirements for creating, documenting, and publishing alignments and crosswalks [7]. A complementary efort is the Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM) [8] that proposes a machine-readable and extensible vocabulary to describe metadata that makes imprecision, inaccuracy and incompleteness in correspondences explicit.
1. Introduction CEUR Workshop Proceedings
Alignment API format and EDOAL [9], they lack on providing rich metadata on the alignments. Alignments have at least to be described with metadata on their provenance (who, when, tool, tool version, etc.), usage license, version (as ontologies evolve),and so on.
Requirement 2: correspondences have to be described with rich metadata A fine-grained metadata is required at correspondence level, in terms of relation interpretation, confidence interpretation, explanation, justification (how the correspondence has been found). In fact, it is hard to interpret the truth relation expressed between the involved ontologies entities within a correspondence, without clear statements.
Requirement 3: alignments have to be published For being reusable, alignments have to the accessible. They have to be at least exposed and stored, in dedicated repositories (e.g., github), and ideally indexed in alignment (searchable) catalogs. They have to be published with standard formats. It is evident that the field lacks searchable services (Linked Open Alignment service, LOA), as LOV for ontologies.
Requirement 4: alignments have to be exposed with content negotiation This set of minimum requirements has not been defined from questionnaires and deeper discussion in the community, but rather from observations on the FAIR recommendations in general.
As a future work, an alignment of recommendations ([