Ontological Analysis of FAIR Supporting Resources

Aligning with the FAIR Principles is a key requirement for European-funded research. However, different interpretations of the FAIR Principles lead to diverging evaluations of how to implement them. Previous research introduced the FAIR Implementation Profile (FIP) as a driver to accelerate broad community convergence on FAIR implementation options. To scale FIP creation and analysis, we established a decentralised socio-technical ecosystem, supported by a lightweight FIP ontology including a typology of FAIR Supporting Resources (FSRs). However, categorising FSR instances is sometimes challenging, suggesting that there are unclarities in the FSR type definitions. This paper presents an ontological analysis of the FSR typology, aiming to improve its accuracy in supporting the peer-reviewed curation process of FSR descriptions provided by a wide community of FIP users. Using the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) as a reference, we analysed class definitions and demonstrated UFO’s capability to resolve controversies leading to disambiguation of FSRs of type FAIR Specification and FAIR Practice.