The Comparative Anatomy of Nanopublications and FAIR Digital Objects
type: Nanopublication
has assertion: assertion
has provenance: provenance
has publication info: pubinfo
created: 2026-06-30T15:12:45.000+02:00
creator: DOI-bot
license: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
has nanopub type: ScholarlyWork
introduces: The Comparative Anatomy of Nanopublications and FAIR Digital Objects

The Comparative Anatomy of Nanopublications and FAIR Digital Objects
type: Article
abstract: Beginning in 1995, early Internet pioneers proposed Digital Objects as encapsulations of data and metadata made accessible through persistent identifier resolution services. In recent years, this Digital Object Architecture has been extended to include the FAIR Guiding Principles, resulting in the concept of a FAIR Digital Object (FDO), a minimal, uniform container making any digital resource machine-actionable. Beginning in 2009, nanopublications were independently conceived as a minimal, uniform container making individual semantic assertions and their associated provenance metadata, machine-actionable. These two technologies share the same vision of a data infrastructure, and act as instances of Machine-Actionable Containers (MACs) that make use of minimal uniform standards to enable FAIR operations. Here, we compare the structure and computational behaviors of the existing nanopublication infrastructure, to those in the proposed FAIR Digital Object Framework. Although developed independently there are clear parallels between the vision and the approach of nanopublication and FDOF. We find a remarkable congruence between the currently proposed FDO requirements and the existing nanopublication infrastructure, including several FDO-like qualities already embodied in the nanopublication ecosystem.
date: 2022-10-12
is part of: Research Ideas and Outcomes
author list: author-list
volume: 8

Marek Suchánek
affiliation: Czech Technical University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic

Erik Schultes

Luiz Bonino da Silva Santos
affiliation: University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands

Tobias Kuhn
affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Barbara Magagna

Barend Mons
affiliation: Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, Netherlands

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has algorithm: RSA
signed by: Tobias Kuhn
signed by: DOI-bot