The FAIR principles have been widely cited, endorsed and adopted by a broad range of stakeholders since their publication in 2016. By intention, the 15 FAIR guiding principles do not dictate specific technological implementations, but provide guidance for improving Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability of digital resources. This has likely contributed to the broad adoption of the FAIR principles, because individual stakeholder communities can implement their own FAIR solutions. However, it has also resulted in inconsistent interpretations that carry the risk of leading to incompatible implementations. Thus, while the FAIR principles are formulated on a high level and may be interpreted and implemented in different ways, for true interoperability we need to support convergence in implementation choices that are widely accessible and (re)-usable. We introduce the concept of FAIR implementation considerations to assist accelerated global participation and convergence towards accessible, robust, widespread and consistent FAIR implementations. Any self-identified stakeholder community may either choose to reuse solutions from existing implementations, or when they spot a gap, accept the challenge to create the needed solution, which, ideally, can be used again by other communities in the future. Here, we provide interpretations and implementation considerations (choices and challenges) for each FAIR principle.

The Web of Data has grown enormously over the last years. Currently, it comprises a large compendium of interlinked and distributed datasets from multiple domains. The abundance of datasets has motivated considerable work for developing SPARQL query federation systems, the dedicated means to access data distributed over the Web of Data. However, the granularity of previous evaluations of such systems has not allowed deriving of insights concerning their behavior in different steps involved during federated query processing. In this work, we perform extensive experiments to compare state-of-the-art SPARQL endpoint federation systems using the comprehensive performance evaluation framework FedBench. We extend the scope of the performance evaluation by considering additional criteria to the commonly used key criterion (i.e. the query runtime). In particular, we consider the number of sources selected, total number of SPARQL ASK requests used, and source selection time, the criteria which have not received much attention in the previous studies. Yet, we show that they have a significant impact on the overall query runtime of existing systems. Also, we extend FedBench to mirror a highly distributed data environment and assess the behavior of existing systems by using the same four criteria. As the result we provide a detailed analysis of the experimental outcomes that reveal novel insights for improving current and future SPARQL federation systems.

Bioinformatics research relies heavily on the ability to discover and correlate data from various sources. The specialization of life sciences over the past decade, coupled with an increasing number of biomedical datasets available through standardized interfaces, has created opportunities towards new methods in biomedical discovery. Despite the popularity of semantic web technologies in tackling the integrative bioinformatics challenge, there are many obstacles towards its usage by non-technical research audiences. In particular, the ability to fully exploit integrated information needs using improved interactive methods intuitive to the biomedical experts. In this report we present ReVeaLD (a Real-time Visual Explorer and Aggregator of Linked Data), a user-centered visual analytics platform devised to increase intuitive interaction with data from distributed sources. ReVeaLD facilitates query formulation using a domain-specific language (DSL) identified by biomedical experts and mapped to a self-updated catalogue of elements from external sources. ReVeaLD was implemented in a cancer research setting; queries included retrieving data from in silico experiments, protein modeling and gene expression. ReVeaLD was developed using Scalable Vector Graphics and JavaScript and a demo with explanatory video is available at http://www.srvgal78.deri.ie:8080/explorer. A set of user-defined graphic rules controls the display of information through media-rich user interfaces. Evaluation of ReVeaLD was carried out as a game: biomedical researchers were asked to assemble a set of 5 challenge questions and time and interactions with the platform were recorded. Preliminary results indicate that complex queries could be formulated under less than two minutes by unskilled researchers. The results also indicate that supporting the identification of the elements of a DSL significantly increased intuitiveness of the platform and usability of semantic web technologies by domain users.

Gathering information from the distributed Web of Data is commonly carried out by using SPARQL query federation approaches. However, the fitness of current SPARQL query federation approaches for real applications is difficult to evaluate with current benchmarks as they are either synthetic, too small in size and complexity or do not provide means for a fine-grained evaluation. We propose LargeRDFBench, a billion-triple benchmark for SPARQL query federation which encompasses real data as well as real queries pertaining to real bio-medical use cases. We evaluate state-of-the-art SPARQL endpoint federation approaches on this benchmark with respect to their query runtime, triple pattern-wise source selection, number of endpoints requests, and result completeness and correctness. Our evaluation results suggest that the performance of current SPARQL query federation systems on simple queries (in terms of total triple patterns, query result set sizes, execution time, use of SPARQL features etc.) does not reflect the systems' performance on more complex queries. Moreover, current federation systems seem unable to deal with real queries that involve processing large intermediate result sets or lead to large result sets.

Gathering information from the distributed Web of Data is commonly carried out by using SPARQL query federation approaches. However, the fitness of current SPARQL query federation approaches for real applications is difficult to evaluate with current benchmarks as they are either synthetic, too small in size and complexity or do not provide means for a fine-grained evaluation. We propose LargeRDFBench, a billion-triple benchmark for SPARQL query federation which encompasses real data as well as real queries pertaining to real bio-medical use cases. We evaluate state-of-the-art SPARQL endpoint federation approaches on this benchmark with respect to their query runtime, triple pattern-wise source selection, number of endpoints requests, and result completeness and correctness. Our evaluation results suggest that the performance of current SPARQL query federation systems on simple queries (in terms of total triple patterns, query result set sizes, execution time, use of SPARQL features etc.) does not reflect the systems' performance on more complex queries. Moreover, current federation systems seem unable to deal with real queries that involve processing large intermediate result sets or lead to large result sets.