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.
The Comparative Anatomy of Nanopublications and FAIR Digital Objects
University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands
Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Czech Technical University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic
Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, Netherlands