HOW “FAIR” IS OUR DATA

FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable. FAIR data and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) are two crucial building blocks for the future of collaborative, data-driven research. Much work is currently ongoing to turn these high-level principles and concepts into reality: as concrete infrastructure, standards and practices.

Using FAIR data in the most effective manner and to onboard industrial partnerships within the EOSC is one of the main initiatives of the European Commission.

Tony Ross-Hellauer, senior scientist at Know-Center opened the Focus on FAIR Workshop with an introduction talk and welcomed all participants.

Prof. Stefanie Lindstaedt, CEO, Know-Center & Head of Institute of Interactive Systems and Data Science, presented the strategic project of Graz University of Technology – “Digital TU Graz” with a special focus on the Field of Opportunity – Research. She also moderated an extremely engaging and insightful Panel Discussion.

Objectives of Panel Discussion

Our experts from the Know-Center alongwith industry experts shared their views on how to exchange more data in order to have an effective collaboration between the Industry and Research in the Panel Discussion. Another talking point was, how best can the FAIR principles be translated into the Industry, leading to business innovation. The Panel also shed some light on the following discussion points:

• Brief overview/summary of data management infrastructures and governance in industry

• How prepared/interested are companies for/in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)

• Relevance of FAIR principles for industry

• Challenges & possible solutions – University & industry cooperation in terms of sharing (research) data

Experts who took part in the Panel Discussion:

There was a representation from both Industry and Research,

• Ass. Prof. Viktoria Pammer-Schindler, Data-Driven Business, TUG & Know-Center
• Christof Wolf-Brenner, Big Data Consultant, Know-Center

• Andre Perchthaler, Director, Global Transportation Solutions, NXP Semiconductors

• Josiane Xavier Parreira, Siemens Corporate Technology

• Dr. Bernhard Peischl, Innovation manager at AVL

Viktoria Pammer-Schindler stated the importance and relevance of FAIR data in company innovation both from internal and external routes. She also pointed out that there are a lot of challenges to achieve this. One being “making” data re-usable – data is always collected within a particular context; and re-using data for another purpose is simply not so easy. Another being, understanding the value of data, and data-related value entities (additional features, enhanced products, new services, predictions, etc). These concepts are brand new at a global level and require a lot of learning and practicing in an ethical manner. This is also new at a local level since decision makers within the company need to understand data, technology and their own business domain.

Know-Center is currently working on this area intensively, and is already about to start with at least two new projects in this area – ON-MERRIT, an EU project, and the DDAI COMET module at the Know-Center.

Christof Wolf-Brenner steered the discussion towards understanding the challenge faced by the Analytics to extract data from the commonly used traditional platforms for data-sharing such as office docs, audio files, etc. However, formats like the PDF, which are optimised for visualisation for the human eye, make the job of Analytics even harder as the data cannot be extracted easily. Hence, Christof Wolf-Brenner suggested the use of newer and optimal platforms for data sharing, that can jump start the use of FAIR data across industries.

Vision of EOSC in the realm of FAIR Data

The EOSC is determined to allocate major resources, both in terms of workforce and infrastructure to work towards building seamless services for storage, management, analysis and re-use of research data, across borders and scientific disciplines by federating existing scientific data infrastructures, currently dispersed across disciplines and the EU Member States.”

The participants welcomed the TU Graz strategy for the development of the Research Data Management policy, tools and services.

This Workshop was organized by a dedicated team of Open and Reproducible Research Group at TU Graz as one of the dissemination activities of the Digital TU Graz project.