This draft report was submitted by the EOSC Semantic Interoperability Task Force to the EOSC Association’s Quality Review Committee’s (QRC) assessment on 18 January 2024.
This document expands on and provides nuance to some of the concepts defined in the EOSC Interoperability Framework (EOSC-IF) report and its reference architecture. It accounts for a deep-dive into the landscape of semantic interoperability implementations and a wide range of interoperability scenarios focused around the Semantic Interoperability Specification, some subtypes of Semantic Business Objects, as well as the Semantic Artefact Catalogue and Mapping Repository. A small set of new concepts of relevance to this work and to EOSC at large have also been added.
The introduction provides context to the creation of this report, the basic concepts section provides and overview of the related components of the EOSC-IF, and the following four sections summarise explorations that frame the concluding set of recommendation to the EOSC community at large.
The explorations that frame the recommendations are titled as follows:
The Semantic Interoperability Specification: Implementation profiles for communities
The Semantic Artefact Catalogue: Twelve maturity dimensions
The Mapping Repository: Mappings, crosswalks and common (meta)data elements
Implementation examples: Common use cases and real-world case studies
The recommendations themselves are organised under the following five broad categories:
Align emerging adaptations and implementations to the semantic view of the EOSC-IF reference architecture.
Identify and consolidate different approaches to representing and exchanging (meta)data with the FDO model described in the EOSC-IF.
Extend the EOSC-IF to include a research process perspective that can support convergence on solutions for common use cases.
Extend the set of semantic objects to include artefacts such as mappings and crosswalks.
Recognise the semantic artefact catalogue as a critical part of the long-term viability of any research data infrastructure.