F-UJI (FAIRsFAIR Research Data Object Assessment Service)

Developers: Anusuriya Devaraju, Robert Huber

Overview

F-UJI is a web service to programatically assess FAIRness of research data objects based on metrics developed by the FAIRsFAIR project. The service will be applied to demostrate the evaluation of objects in repositories selected for in-depth collaboration with the project.

Assessment Scope, Constraint and Limitation

The service is in development and its assessment depends on several factors.

In the FAIR ecosystem, FAIR assessment must go beyond the object itself. FAIR enabling services and repositories are vital to ensure that research data objects remain FAIR over time. Importantly, machine-readable services (e.g., registries) and documents (e.g., policies) are required to enable automated tests.
In addition to repository and services requirements, automated testing depends on clear machine assessable criteria. Some aspects (rich, plurality, accurate, relevant) specified in FAIR principles still require human mediation and interpretation.
The tests must focus on generally applicable data/metadata characteristics until domain/community-driven criteria have been agreed (e.g., appropriate schemas and required elements for usage/access control, etc.). For example, for some of the metrics (i.e., on I and R principles), the automated tests we proposed only inspect the ‘surface’ of criteria to be evaluated. Therefore, tests are designed in consideration of generic cross-domain metadata standards such as dublin core, dcat, datacite, schema.org, etc.
FAIR assessment is performed based on aggregated metadata; this includes metadata embedded in the data (landing) page, metadata retrieved from a PID provider (e.g., Datacite content negotiation) and other services (e.g., re3data).

Requirements

Python 3.5.2+

The service was generated by the swagger-codegen project. By using the OpenAPI-Spec from a remote server, you can easily generate a server stub.
The service uses the Connexion library on top of Flask.

Usage

Before running the service, please set user details in the config file, see config/server.ini To start the service, please execute the following from the root directory:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt
python3 -m fuji_server -c <path_to_server.ini>

and open your browser to here:

http://localhost:1071/fuji/api/v1/ui/

Your Swagger definition lives here:

http://localhost:1071/uji/api/v1/swagger.json

Note: To avoid tika startup warning message, set environment variable TIKA_LOG_PATH. For more information, see https://github.com/chrismattmann/tika-python

License