Machine-Actionable Data Management Plans: A Knowledge Retrieval Approach to Automate the Assessment of Funders’ Requirements

Abstract

Funding bodies and other policy-makers are increasingly more concerned with Research Data Management (RDM). The Data Management Plan (DMP) is one of the tools available to perform RDM tasks, however it is not a perfect concept. The Machine-Actionable Data Management Plan (maDMP) is a concept that aims to make the DMP interoperable, automated and increasingly standardised. In this paper we showcase that through the usage of semantic technologies, it is possible to both express and exploit the features of the maDMP. In particular, we focus on showing how a maDMP formalised as an ontology can be used automate the assessment of a funder's requirements for a given organisation.

pISA-tree - a data management framework for life science research projects using a standardised directory tree

“…To promote the adoption of FAIR principles, many funding organisations and journals are committed to FAIR and open data principles 25,26 . Often, proposals submitted for evaluation are expected to contain at least a draft of data management plan 27 . This plan often has to incorporate policies for data collection, organisation and exchange throughout the project duration and also after its end, since it must also take into account local storage and deposition to publicly accessible repositories.…”

“…The user is encouraged to create the pISA-tree directory structure and corresponding metadata files before conducting the experiments. However, considering the impracticality of strict requirements for immediate metadata input, which could discourage end-users 27 , pISA-tree flexibility allows the user to complete or correct the metadata at the later stages. This is a very convenient feature trait of pISA-tree compared to other systems such as ISA tools 13 , which assume that the assays have already been carried out and the data was analysed.…”

Packaging research artefacts with RO-Crate

“…For instance, in the discussion on supporting ad-hoc vocabularies 20 in RO-Crate, the community explored potential Linked Data solutions. The conventional wisdom in RDF best practices 21 is to establish a vocabulary with a new IRI namespace, formalised using RDF Schema 22 or OWL 23 ontologies. However, this may seem an excessive learning curve for non-experts in semantic knowledge representation, and the RO-Crate community instead agreed on a dual lightweight approach: (i) Document 24 how projects with their own Web-presence can make a pure HTML-based vocabulary, and (ii) provide a community-wide PID namespace under https://w3id.org/ro/terms that redirect to simple CSV files maintained in GitHub.…”

“…Machine-actionable Data Management Plans (maDMPs) have been proposed as an improvement to automate FAIR data management tasks in research [88]; maDMPs use PIDs and controlled vocabularies to describe what happens to data over the research life cycle [22]. The Research Data Alliance's DMP Common Standard for maDMPs [121] is one such formalisation for expressing maDMPs, which can be expressed as Linked Data using the DMP Common Standard Ontology [21], a specialisation of the W3C Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) [3].…”

Progress on Data Stewardship Wizard during BioHackathon Europe 2020

“…Moreover, integrations with other services using APIs to help researchers filling answers is just a question of configuration. As we summarize in this report, during the BioHackathon Europe 2020, we strived to outline how to increase machine-actionability beyond RDA DMP Common Standard (Miksa, Walk, & Neish, 2020) (Cardoso, Proença, & Borbinha, 2020), to incorporate new integrations for answer suggestions, and to enhance our data stewardship knowledge model to further help researchers in the future. As part of the work we also implemented the Horizon 2020 DMP template and updated maDMP template according to the latest release of the standard.…”