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<article xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Ontology Engineering and the FAIR principles: A Gap Analysis toward a FAIR-by-design methodology⋆</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>María Poveda-Villalón</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">3</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Daniel Garijo</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">3</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Alejandra N. Gonzalez-Beltran</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">2</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Clement Jonquet</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Yann Le Franc</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">4</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>LIRMM, Univ. of Montpellier</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>CNRS, Montpellier</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="FR">France</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff1">
          <label>1</label>
          <institution>MISTEA, Univ. of Montpellier, INRAE, Inst. Agro</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Montpellier</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="FR">France</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff2">
          <label>2</label>
          <institution>Scientific Computing, Science and Technology Facilities Council</institution>
          ,
          <country country="UK">UK</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff3">
          <label>3</label>
          <institution>Universidad Politécnica de Madrid</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Madrid</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="ES">Spain</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff4">
          <label>4</label>
          <institution>e-Science Data Factory</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Montpellier</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="FR">France</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <abstract>
        <p>Ontologies and vocabularies play a key role when standardising, organizing and integrating data from heterogeneous data sources into Knowledge Graphs. In order to develop ontologies, diferent engineering methodologies have been proposed throughout the years, whose application resulted in thousands of semantic artefacts (taxonomies, vocabularies and ontologies) in a wide range of domains. But how to ensure that ontologies follow the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable principles (FAIR) from their inception? In this paper, we review: (i) existing guidelines to help make ontologies FAIR and (ii) published FAIRness assessment methodologies and map them to the ontology development lifecycle activities. Our analysis outlines the current gaps, where no guidelines exist for ontologies to become FAIR-by-design.</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
        <kwd>eol&gt;Ontology Engineering</kwd>
        <kwd>FAIR principles</kwd>
        <kwd>FAIRness assessment</kwd>
        <kwd>FAIR-by-design</kwd>
        <kwd>Semantic Artefacts</kwd>
        <kwd>Ontologies</kwd>
        <kwd>Vocabularies</kwd>
      </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>1. Introduction</title>
      <p>
        Ontologies and vocabularies play a key role in data integration by defining the structure, guiding
the construction, and validating Knowledge Graphs. Ontologies are widely used in multiple
domains, ranging from Biomedicine [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ] and Astrophysics [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ] to Smart Cities [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ] or Web content
annotation [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        A number of ontology engineering methodologies have been proposed by researchers through
the years in order to build ontologies [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10 ref11 ref12 ref5 ref6 ref7 ref8 ref9">5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12</xref>
        ] and finally [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
        ] that we, in part,
developed. These methodologies define the steps and activities needed to gather ontology
requirements, discuss with domain experts, reuse existing vocabularies, validate the results, etc.
Among them, Linked Open Terms (LOT) [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
        ] is the only one addressing an online publication
and maintenance activity, key for sharing and sustaining the obtained semantic artefacts.
      </p>
      <p>
        With the growing adoption of the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR)
principles for data [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">14</xref>
        ], diferent eforts have proposed guidelines to apply FAIR in ontologies
and vocabularies [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ] [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
        ] [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
        ] [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">18</xref>
        ] [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">19</xref>
        ]. However, no alignment between ontology development
methodologies and the guidelines/recommendations for FAIR ontologies has been developed
so far. In practice, the compliance with the FAIR guidelines is usually validated ’afterwards’
i.e., at the end of the ontology development processes without being integrated in the ontology
development life-cycle.
      </p>
      <p>In this paper, we explore this challenge by mapping all the currently existing guidelines
for developing FAIR ontologies and vocabularies to the diferent stages of one (LOT) ontology
engineering development process. For each stage, we identify the gaps of the current good
practices and discuss potential solutions to address them. With this work, we aim to pave the
way towards a FAIR-by-design ontology engineering methodology.</p>
      <p>The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 introduces state-of-the-art
methodologies and FAIR guidelines. Section 3 describes the method we followed to map together
existing FAIR guidelines against the LOT methodology and the obtained results, while Section 4
discusses the main gaps outlined in our analysis. Section 5 concludes the paper.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>2. Related Work</title>
      <p>
        Ontology engineering has attracted the interest of researchers during decades, and as a
consequence, a number of methodologies have been proposed to develop ontologies (e.g., Gruninger
&amp; Fox [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ], METHONTOLOGY [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ], Ontology Development 101 [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ], On-To-Knowledge [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ],
Diligent[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
        ], NeOn [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ], eXtreme Design with ODP [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">11</xref>
        ], SAMOD [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">12</xref>
        ], Linked Open Terms
(LOT) [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
        ]). While these methodologies propose diferent life-cycles and activities, they
usually start with ontology requirement specification, then ontology implementation, optionally
including a previous conceptualisation activity, finalizing with ontology evaluation.
      </p>
      <p>Within these methodologies, LOT is the first one that considered the ontology publication
phase, including their registration in public repositories, which is vital to increase the ontology’s
FAIRness level. In addition, LOT also considered the ontology reuse phase, addressing ’R’ from
FAIR. Thus, LOT was the first ontology engineering methodology addressing the FAIR principles.
This is the case because most other methodologies were developed prior to the publication of
the FAIR principles. Considering this, we selected LOT as basis for our study.</p>
      <p>
        However, when considering the FAIR principles applied to semantic artefacts, and more
precisely ontologies, a number of guidelines have been proposed in the last years. Their authors
are now join within the FAIR-IMPACT project. During 2020, ten guidelines for publishing FAIR
vocabularies were proposed covering the design of accessible ontology URIs, the generation of
reusable documentation and the correct publication of the ontology code and human oriented
documentation by Garijo and Poveda-Villalón [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ]. Later, in 2021, Cox et al [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
        ] presented ten
rules for publishing FAIR vocabularies focusing on the transformation of legacy vocabularies
into semantic artefacts as SKOS terminologies or OWL ontologies. In 2022. Le Franc et al.
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
        ] published a list of 17 recommendations about identifiers, metadata and repositories in the
context of the FAIRsFAIR H2020 project. In the same year, Amdouni et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">18</xref>
        ] proposed the
O’FAIRe methodology as a list of 61 questions for ontology FAIRness assessment. Finally, in
2023, Xu et. al [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">19</xref>
        ] presented a list of 11 features, related to identifiers, metadata and publication,
that a FAIR vocabulary should have.
      </p>
      <p>These eforts on ontology development methodologies and guidelines for improving ontology
FAIRness have so far evolved independently. In this work, we align these approaches to LOT,
hence proposing the first steps towards a FAIR-by-design methodology for building ontologies.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>3. Methodology and Results</title>
      <p>This section describes the process we followed to identify gaps and alignments between diferent
existing FAIR guidelines for ontologies and the LOT methodology.</p>
      <p>Figure 1 shows an overview of LOT methodology. LOT is organised in four phases, which
are split in specific activities. As the activities in “Ontology requirements specification” and
“Ontology maintenance” phases are too detailed to be mapped to the FAIR Principles, we
decided to map the FAIR principles at the phase level. For the “Ontology implementation”
and “Ontology publication” phases, the FAIR Principles are mapped at activity level as the
activities in these phases are more technical. The “Propose release candidate” activity is not
considered in this exercise, as it is not a technical activity. In summary, from now we will
refer to the selected phases or activities as “activity”. We considered the following activities
for our analysis: requirements specification, reuse, conceptualization, encoding, evaluation,
documentation, publication and maintenance.</p>
      <p>Ontology
requirements
specification
concOepnttuolaoligzyation</p>
      <p>Ontology
encoding
ORSD</p>
      <p>Ontology model</p>
      <p>Ontology code
Ont. Devel.</p>
      <p>Users
Experts</p>
      <p>Ontology implementation</p>
      <p>Ont. Devel.</p>
      <p>Ontology reuse
Ont. Devel.</p>
      <p>Ont. Devel.</p>
      <p>Users
Experts
Ontology
evaluation
Evaluated
ontology</p>
      <p>Ontology publication</p>
      <p>Ont. Devel.</p>
      <p>Users</p>
      <p>Experts
Ont. Devel.</p>
      <p>Ont. Devel.</p>
      <p>Propose release
candidate</p>
      <p>Ontology
documentation</p>
      <p>Online publication</p>
      <p>Ontology
maintenance
Ontology release
candidate
docuHmTeMnLtation</p>
      <p>Online ontology</p>
      <p>Issues, bugs, etc.</p>
      <p>Legend</p>
      <p>Phase</p>
      <p>Zoom in phase</p>
      <p>LOT
Activity</p>
      <p>Artefact
generated
from acivity
X
X
X
X
X</p>
      <p>X
X</p>
      <p>X</p>
      <p>We followed three main steps in our analysis:
• Step 1. Identify the needs: Ontology developers and experts were asked to identify
any relationship between the considered LOT activities and the FAIR principles. That is,
whether the answer to “Is there something to be done while carrying out the ACTIVITY_X
that could afect the FAIRness level of the final ontology with respect to FAIR_principle_Y ?”
is “Yes”. In that case, a “X” is included in the cell relating the ACTIVITY_X with the
FAIR_principle_Y? in Table 1. This process was carried out following a brainstorming
session (online and ofline). The resulting output is presented in Table 1 which identifies
the needs for best practices for each activity and each FAIR principle regardless whether
potential guidelines exist or not. Such needs are represented with “X”.
• Step 2. Map activities to existing guidelines: The guidelines and recommendations
for increasing ontology FAIRness level described in Section 2 were mapped to the LOT
activities and the FAIR principles addressed by the guidelines (only in case it was not
already mapped in the original work). This process has been carried out in collaboration
with the authors of the corresponding guidelines. The output of this activity is a matrix
of existing guidelines for each LOT activity and each FAIR principle represented in Tables
2 and 3. The guidelines are identified by the following codes (a summary of all referenced
guidelines is included in Appendix A):
– G&amp;P-X : Guideline for publishing FAIR vocabulary X defined by Garijo and
Poveda</p>
      <p>
        Villalón [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ]
– Rule-X : Rule X for FAIR vocabularies defined by Cox, et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
        ]
– P-Rec-X : Preliminary Recommendation X defined by Le Franc et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
        ]
– FY QX : Question X for FAIR principle Y defined in (Amdouni, E. et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">18</xref>
        ]
– FVF-X : FAIR Vocabulary Feature (FVF-) X defined by Xu et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">19</xref>
        ]
      </p>
      <p>F1</p>
      <p>F2</p>
      <p>F3</p>
      <p>F4</p>
      <p>A1.1</p>
      <p>A1.2</p>
      <p>A2
A1
FVF-3
A1Q1
A1Q2
A1Q3
G&amp;P-1
G&amp;P-2
G&amp;P-3
G&amp;P-4
FVF-3
A1Q1
A1Q2
A1Q3
FVF-5
G&amp;P-1
G&amp;P-2
G&amp;P-4
A1Q4
P-Rec 5</p>
      <p>Rule-9
FVF-4
G&amp;P-10
F4Q1
F4Q2
F4Q3
P-Rec 4
P-Rec 5
Rule-8</p>
      <p>FVF-5
G&amp;P-9
A1.1Q1
A1.1Q2
A1.1Q3
P-Rec 5</p>
      <p>FVF-5
A1.2Q1
A1.2Q2
P-Rec7
during which they guidelines should be applied and corresponding FAIR principles
(Findable and Accesible).
• Step 3. Identify gaps: In this step the matrix from step 1 (needs) is compared to the
matrix from step 2 (existing guidelines) in order to identify gaps for those activities for
which a need has been identified but have no recommendations to date. These results
are shown in Table 4 in which for each activity and FAIR principle it is shown whether
a need was detected (content taken from Table 1 marked with “X”) and whether there</p>
      <sec id="sec-3-1">
        <title>Ontology</title>
        <p>Reuse
I2Q1
I2Q2
I2Q3
I2Q4
I2Q5
I2Q7
I2Q6
P-Rec14
P-Rec10</p>
        <p>P-Rec14
FVF-8
P-Rec15
FVF-8
I3Q1
I3Q2
I3Q3
P-Rec10
P-Rec12</p>
        <p>I2Q2
R1Q5
Rule-3
FVF-2
FVF-9
G&amp;P-6
R1Q6
R1Q1
R1Q2
R1Q3</p>
        <p>R1Q4
FVF-8
P-Rec15</p>
        <p>FVF-9</p>
        <p>G&amp;P-8
Rule-10</p>
        <p>FVF-10
G&amp;P-6
Rule-2
G&amp;P-6
FVF-10
G&amp;P-6
R1.1Q1
R1.1Q2
R1.1Q3
P-Rec3
P-Rec16
FVF-10
G&amp;P-6</p>
        <p>P-Rec15
G&amp;P-6
G&amp;P-8
P-Rec3
P-Rec17
Rule-7
during which they guidelines should be applied and corresponding FAIR principles
(Interoperable and Reusable).
are existing guidelines covering it (represented by a “Y” in the cell in case at least one
guideline was mapped for that cell in Table 2 or 3) or whether there is an identified gap
(represented by “gap” in the cell in case no guideline was mapped for that cell in Tables 2
and 3).</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-2">
        <title>FAIR</title>
        <p>principle
O. Req.</p>
        <p>Spec.</p>
        <p>Ontology</p>
        <p>Reuse
Ontology
Conceptua
Olinztaotliogny
Encoding
Ontology
Evaluation
Ontology
Documen
Ontattoiloongy</p>
        <p>Publi
Ocnattoiloongy
Mainten.
F1
X
gap
X
Y
X
Y
X
Y
X
gap
F2
X
gap
X
gap
X
Y
X
Y
A2 I1
X
gap
X
Y
X
Y
X X
Y Y
X
gap
X
Y
X
Y
X
Y
X
Y
X
Y
X
Y
X
gap
X
Y
X
gap
X
Y
X
Y
X
Y
X
Y
X
gap
X
Y
X
Y</p>
        <p>X
Y
X
Y
X
Y
X
gap
X
Y
X
Y</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>4. Discussion</title>
      <p>As shown in Tables 2, 3 and 4, there is a high availability of guidelines and recommendations
for ontology encoding, documentation and publication activities. This situation is expected
considering that the guidelines analyzed focus on ontologies and vocabularies based on semantic
web technologies and this community has been driven by best practices for publishing code
and human oriented documentation by applying content negotiation mechanisms1. Despite
this situation, ontology FAIRness may be improved during the ontology documentation activity
by providing metadata and provenance information about the documentation itself, that is
applying FAIR principles I1 and I2 to the documentation resources (e.g., HTML pages, diagrams,
etc.)</p>
      <p>According to the results shown in Table 4 (gaps), it is clear that the ontology requirement
specification activity has been largely neglected by existing guidelines and recommendations
about FAIR ontologies. This might be due to the fact that, even though requirements are the
basis for any ontology development project, their management and maintenance is usually
relegated once the ontology is built. Making sure ontology requirements are available online
with a persistent identifier and maintained (versioned) after each ontology release may help
explain ontology design decisions and provenance, as well as incorporating new changes in
consistently in future releases.</p>
      <p>Similarly, it can be observed that ontology evaluation has not been addressed in general by
existing guidelines for FAIR ontologies. Ontology evaluation reports and tests, like ontology
requirements, have not been considered main products during the ontology development process.
1Seehttps://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-vocab-pub/
Guidelines for documenting, annotating and sharing tests and results are needed. For example,
authors tend to mention in their publications whether an evaluation or FAIRness assessment
tool was used to improve an ontology, but the assessment report is usually not included in the
corresponding ontology documentation.</p>
      <p>Regarding the ontology reuse activity, main recommendations about using standard languages,
checking the FAIRness level and licences of reused ontologies are already considered. However,
there is a lack of guidance about how to describe the type of ontology reuse and provenance
using metadata.</p>
      <p>
        Current approaches to increase the FAIRness level of ontologies consist in assessing them
once an ontology is built and published. Automated tools like FOOPS! [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref20">20</xref>
        ] or O’FAIRe [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21">21</xref>
        ]
help identifying issues which have to be addressed by ontology developers by hand. However,
according to results shown in Table 1 it is clear than increasing the FAIRness level of an ontology
should be addressed along its whole development life-cycle (e.g., carefully documenting design
decisions and requirements, including ontology metadata in the conceptualization phase, etc.)
and not just at the end.
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>5. Conclusions and future work</title>
      <p>In this paper, we have aligned the main guidelines for developing FAIR ontologies with the
LOT ontology development methodology, with the goal of paving the way for a FAIR-by-design
methodology for building ontologies.</p>
      <p>In addition, main gaps to be addressed by the complete FAIR-by-design methodology have
been identified. In general, further recommendations are needed for ontology development
activities producing resources other than the main ontology code, as it has been observed that
most of the recommendations focus mainly on the ontology code and the associated metadata,
but no other resources like ontology requirements or tests.</p>
      <p>
        During the analysis it has been observed the diferent granularity levels provided by existing
guidelines. For example, P-Rec3 [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
        ] suggests to use minimum metadata to describe the semantic
artefact or ontology including pointers to a number of recommendations for potential metadata
to be used, while the O’FAIRe questions [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">18</xref>
        ] refer to MIRO [? ] ’must’ and ’should’ metadata,
include questions about how the metadata is provided and propose other questions about
specific metadata fields. Other guidelines like [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ] propose a set of metadata fields suggesting
to include them in the ontology header.
      </p>
      <p>The presented work is being extended by producing recommendations and guidelines to
increase the FAIRness level of ontologies for those activities where gaps have been identified.
In addition, tools for helping during each activity will be suggested to ease the development
process as much as possible.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
      <title>Acknowledgments</title>
      <p>This work has been funded by the European Horizon Europe programme under the grant
agreement no. 101057344 (FAIR-IMPACT) and 101016854 (AURORAL). Authors would like to
thank colleagues contributing to the identification of needs and mapping existing guidelines,
FAIR-IMPACT partners and co-authors of the milestone compiling preliminary mappings2,
namely: Xeni Kechagioglou, Fuqi Xu, Carole Goble, Stian Soiland-Reyes and Sophie Aubin.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-7">
      <title>A. Existing guidelines for FAIR ontologies</title>
      <p>
        G&amp;P-X: Guideline for publishing FAIR vocabulary X defined by Garijo and Poveda-Villalón [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ]
• G&amp;P-1: Design ontology name and prefix
• G&amp;P-2: Decide between hash or slash URIs
• G&amp;P-3: Decide whether to use opaque URIs
• G&amp;P-4: Define an ontology versioning strategy
• G&amp;P-5: Use of permanent URIs
• G&amp;P-6: Generate ontology metadata
• G&amp;P-7: Generate HMTL documentation
• G&amp;P-8: Generate diagrams
• G&amp;P-9: Provide the ontology online in multiple formats (HTML and ontology
serializations)
• G&amp;P-10: Make the ontology findable on the Web
• Rule-1: Determine the governance arrangements and custodian of the legacy vocabulary
• Rule-2: Verify that the legacy-vocabulary license allows repurposing, and agree on the
license for the FAIR vocabulary
• Rule-3: Check term and definition completeness and consistency in the legacy vocabulary
• Rule-4: Establish a traceable maintenance-environment for the FAIR vocabulary content
• Rule-5: Assign a unique and persistent identifier to (a) the vocabulary and (b) each term
in the vocabulary
• Rule-6: Create machine readable representations of the vocabulary terms
• Rule-7: Add vocabulary metadata
• Rule-8: Register the vocabulary
• Rule-9: Make the vocabulary accessible for humans and machines
• Rule-10: Implement a process for publishing revisions of the FAIR vocabulary
P-Rec-X: Preliminary Recommendation X defined by Le Franc et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
        ]
• P-Rec1: Globally Unique, Persistent and Resolvable Identifiers must be used for Semantics
      </p>
      <p>
        Artefacts, their content (terms/concepts/classes and relations) and their versions
• P-Rec2: Globally Unique, Persistent and Resolvable Identifiers must be used for Semantic
Artefact Metadata Records. Metadata and data must be published separately, even if it is
managed jointly
• P-Rec3: A common minimum metadata schema must be used to describe semantic artefacts
and their content
• P-Rec4: Semantic Artefact and its content should be published in an appropriate semantic
repository
• P-Rec5: Semantic repositories must ofer a common API to access semantic artefacts and
their content in various serialisations for both use/reuse and indexation by search engines
• P-Rec6: Build semantic artefact search engines that operate across diferent semantic
repositories
• P-Rec7: Repository should ofer a secure protocol and user access control functionalities
• P-Rec8: Human and machine-readable persistence policies for semantic artefacts metadata
and data must be defined
• P-Rec9: Semantic artefacts must be made available as a minimum portfolio of common
serialisation formats
• P-Rec10: Foundational Ontologies may be used to align semantic artefacts
• P-Rec11: A standardised language should be used for describing high expressivity semantic
artefacts
FYQX: Question X for FAIR Principle Y defined in Amdouni, E. et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">18</xref>
        ]
• F1Q1: Does the ontology have a "local" identifier, i.e., a globally unique and potentially
permanent identifier assigned by the developer (or developing organization)?
• F1Q2: Does the ontology provide an additional “external” identifier, i.e., a guarantee
globally unique and persistent identifier assigned by an accredited body? If yes, is the
external identifier a DOI?
• F1Q3: Are the ontology metadata clearly identified either by the same identifier than the
ontology (if included in the ontology file) or with its own globally unique and persistent
identifier?
• F1Q4: Does the ontology provide a version-specific URI, and is this URI resolvable?
• F2Q1: Is the ontology described with additional ’MIRO must’ metadata properties?
• F2Q2: Is the ontology described with additional ’MIRO should’ or ’optional’ metadata
properties?
• F2Q3: Is the ontology described with another metadata property with no explicit
corresponding MIRO requirement?
• F3Q1: Are the ontology metadata included and maintained in the ontology file?
• F3Q2: If not, are the ontology metadata described in an external file?
• F3Q3: Does that external file explicitly link to the ontology and vice-versa?
• F4Q1: Is the ontology registered in multiple ontology ’libraries’?
• F4Q2: Is the ontology registered in multiple open ontology ’repositories’?
• F4Q3: Are the ontology ’libraries’ or ’repositories’ properly indexed by Web search
engines?
• A1Q1: Do the ontology URI and other identifiers, if they exist, resolve to the ontology?
• A1Q2: Does the ontology URI (if metadata are included in the ontology file) or the external
metadata URI resolve to the metadata record?
• A1Q3: Do the ontology URI and the external metadata URI (if the metadata are not
included in the ontology file), support content negotiation?
• A1Q4: Are the ontology and its metadata accessible through another standard protocol
such as SPARQL?
• A1.1Q1: Is the ontology relying on HTTP/URIs for its identification and access
mechanisms?
• A1.1Q2: Is the ontology access protocol open, free, and universally implementable?
• A1.1Q3: If the ontology and metadata are accessible through another protocol, is that
protocol open, free, and universally implementable?
• A1.2Q1: Is the ontology accessible through a protocol that supports authentication and
authorization?
• A1.2Q2: Are the ontology metadata accessible through a protocol that supports
authentication and authorization?
• A2Q1: Is the ontology accessible in a repository that supports versioning?
• A2Q2: Are the ontology metadata of each version available?
• A2Q3: Are the ontology metadata accessible even if no more versions of the ontology are
available?
• A2Q4: Is the status of the ontology clearly informed?
• I1Q1: What is the representation language used for the ontology and ontology metadata?
• I1Q2: Is the representation language used in a W3C Recommendation?
• I1Q3: Is the syntax of the ontology informed?
• I1Q4: Is the formality level of the ontology informed?
• I1Q5: Is the availability of other syntaxes/formats informed?
• I2Q1: Does the ontology import other FAIR vocabularies?
• I2Q2: Does the ontology reuse terms from other FAIR vocabularies (URIs)?
• I2Q3: If yes, does it include the minimum information for those terms?
• I2Q4: Is the ontology aligned to other FAIR vocabularies?
• I2Q5: If yes, are those alignments well represented and to unambiguous entities? If yes,
are those alignments curated?
• I2Q6: Does the ontology provide information about the relation to or influence of other
      </p>
      <p>FAIR vocabularies?
• I2Q7: Does the ontology reuse standard and FAIR metadata vocabularies to describe its
metadata?
• I3Q1: Does the ontology provide qualified cross-references to external
resources/databases?
• I3Q2: If yes, are those cross-references well represented and to unambiguous entities?
• I3Q3: Does the ontology use valid URIs to encode some metadata values?
• R1Q1: Does the ontology provide information about how classes or concepts are defined?
• R1Q2: Does the ontology provide metadata information about its hierarchy?
• R1Q3: How much of the ontology objects are described with labels?
• R1Q4: How much of the ontology objects are defined using a text description?
• R1Q5: How much ontology objects are defined using a property restriction or an
equivalent class?
• R1Q6: How much ontology objects provide provenance information with annotation
properties (e.g., author, date)?
• R1.1Q1: Is the ontology license clearly specified, with an URI that is resolvable and
supports content negotiation?
• R1.1Q2: Are the ontology access rights specified and permissions documented?
• R1.1Q3: Are the ontology usage guidelines and copyright holder documented?
• R1.2Q1: Does the ontology provide information about the actors involved in its
development?
• R1.2Q2: Does the ontology provide information about its general provenance?
• R1.2Q3: Are the accrual methods and policy of the ontology documented?
• R1.2Q4: Is the ontology clearly versioned with version information and links to previous
versions?
• R1.2Q5: Are the ontology latest changes documented?
• R1.2Q6: Are the methodology and tools used to build the ontology documented?
• R1.2Q7: Is the ontology rationale documented?
• R1.2Q8: Does the ontology inform about its funding organization?
• R1.3Q1: Does the ontology provide information about projects using or organizations
endorsing?
• R1.3Q2: Is the ontology included in a specific community set or group?
• R1.3Q3: Is the ontology openly and freely available?
• FVF-1: Vocabulary and their terms are assigned globally unique and persistent identifiers.
• FVF-2: Vocabularies and their terms have rich metadata.
• FVF-3: Vocabularies and their terms can be accessed using the identifiers, preferably by
both human and machine.
• FVF-4: Vocabularies and their terms are registered or indexed in a searchable engine or a
resource.
• FVF-5: Vocabularies and their terms are retrievable using a standardised communications
protocol, preferably open, free and universally implementable protocols. and allows for
authentication and authorisation, where necessary.
• FVF-6: Vocabularies and their terms are persistent over time and are appropriately
versioned
• FVF-7: Vocabularies and their terms use a formal, accessible and broadly applicable, and
preferably machine-understandable language for knowledge representation.
• FVF-8: Vocabularies and terms use qualified references to other vocabularies.
• FVF-9: Vocabularies and terms are described with a plurality of accurate and relevant
attributes.
• FVF-10: Vocabularies are released with a standard data usage licence, preferably
machinereadable licence.
• FVF-11: Vocabularies meet domain relevant community standards</p>
    </sec>
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