About Us

3 min read

Who We Are

We are a team of researchers, developers, and advocates working to build fair and open digital infrastructure.

Our Mission

Our mission is to advance principles of openness, fairness, and transparency across research, data, and digital systems.

Organizing the International FAIR Digital Objects (FDO) Community

The FAIR Digital Object Forum (FDOF) is organizing a plattform to advance the specification and application of FAIR Digital Objects (FDO). The objective is to increase the basic interoperability between the many repositories and dataspaces worldwide and to achieve a better coherence amongst the increasing number of initiatives working on FDO-based designs, implementations and applications in research, industry and other sectors.

The FDO Forum is proposed as a neutral place where policy, researchers and technological experts can meet to exchange information about all relevant aspects related to FDOs. This initiative has the support of major global and a variety of regional and national initiatives. Interested people can join the FDOF work in different ways.

Motivation & Community

The revolution in both scientific and commercial data generation and availability over the past few decades has yet to be matched by a revolution in the ways in which that tsunami of data can be efficiently and effectively managed, used, interpreted, and exchanged. The FAIR Digital Objects (FDO) community brings together the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) Guiding Principles, including its strong emphasis on machine-actionability, with the concept of Digital Objects (DO), which supports interoperability across existing and evolving data regimes (repositories, data spaces, etc.) using powerful principles of abstraction, persistent binding, and encapsulation. We aim toward a new infrastructure, an architectural extension of the Internet – the Internet of FAIR Data and Services – that can help achieve an interoperable, stable, and persistent domain of digital artifacts and thus a reliable and usable digital memory for the coming centuries which will be determined to a transformation towards a digital society. An organized FDO community can help pave the way to automated data management and processing and can serve as an accelerant for advances in semantic technologies, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. FDO Forum activities will be in the service of providing direct and coherent access to the new world of data for science, business and government.

The International FDO Forum will bring together:

  • Infrastructure researchers, engineers and developers responsible for the design and implementation of the evolving domain of digital research artifacts,
  • Information technology researchers, tool builders, and data/service providers, including those from industry, looking to both provide and exploit new infrastructural capabilities, change data management and processing practices, extend the Internet architecture, and design and deploy new semantic technologies,
  • Researchers and Data users who can describe use cases where the need for these new developments are critical in solving technical and societal challenges,
  • Policy makers, funders, and leading thinkers who are guiding the future of the evolving Open Science and Open Data cultures.