Make a vocabulary FAIR

Rules

We devised ten simple rules that would allow you to transform a ‘legacy’ vocabulary into a FAIR vocabulary. We consider a ‘legacy’ vocabulary as a list of terms available in a print-based glossary or in a table not accessible using web standards.

These rules are described in more detail in our peer-reviewed article in PLoS Comp Bio: “Ten simple rules for making a vocabulary FAIR”. The first version of this article is available as an arXiv pre-print.

• 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 maintaining the FAIR vocabulary

Explore examples on how to apply these rules.

We maintain relevant references in a Zotero library.

Use case

We are considering the use case depicted in the following flowchart:

See the image in the live editor