Glossary

Glossary

Accessible

General: The potential of data to be retrieved and accessed.

According to the FAIR principles: The potential of data or metadata to be retrieved through a standardised protocol by resolving a globally unique identifier.

Controlled Vocabulary

A vocabulary which only includes terms that have been deliberately selected by its creators or maintainers.

Data Management Plan (DMP)

A guide describing a series of steps needed to handle data to meet one or more aims. For research data, a data management plan specifies what measures will be taken throughout and often beyond a research project to ensure that its data is well documented, findable, accessible, and reusable.

Digital repository

A place where data, code, software, or other digital assets are stored.

FAIR

The property of data, if they are findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable according to the FAIR principles

FAIR digital object

A digitial container for data or links to data which has its own identifier (usually unique, persistent and web accessible) and contains metadata describing the data and/or the FAIR digital object itself. The container itself is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable according to an implementation of the FAIR principles.

FAIR principles

A set of requirements that data properties needs to fulfill in order for the data to be findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable. Thereby the data will be re-usable for humans and machine-agents in the long-term and thus be sustainable.

Findable

General: The potential of data to be accurately identified as a result of a query towards it or its metadata.

According to the FAIR principles: The potential of data to be accurately discovered due to (1) its association with a persistent globally unique identifier that opens additional search vectors, (2) its description by rich metadata, (3) its unambiguous association with that rich metadata and (4) it being registered or indexed in searchable resources.

Interoperable

General: The potential of two different agents to work together. An agent may be a human or a machine.

According to the FAIR principles: The potential of agents to work together by referencing a digitised terminology that follows the FAIR principle.

License

A license is a legal instrument in which a legal entity grants rights over a protected work - such as those allowing usage, duplication, and redistribution - to another legal entity. Licensing information is the text, code, or other descriptive element that identifies what license some resource is released under

Machine-readable

The potential of data to read all inherent information of that data automatically.

Metadata

Any data which is intended to help contextualise or otherwise qualify other data. Examples include file size, date created, method used to generate the data and identifiers for people who worked on the data.

Metadata schema

A template which shows how metadata is to be structured and stored.

Ontology

A structured collection of terms, their definitions and the relationships between them expressed in a formal, typically machine readable, manner.

Open data

Data which is accessible and reusable freely and without restrictions - monetary, technical or otherwise. For this, it needs to have an open license assigned and should be stored in a form and format that allows ready access and modification of the data.

Persistent Identifier

A persistent identifier (PID) is a long-lasting reference to an object. Some persistent identifiers are linked to kernel information profiles which provide metadata or information about that object when the persistent identifier is resolved.

Provenance

The history which is the sum of those processes relating to the origin, ownership, custody, location, and modification of an entity.

Reusable

General: The potential of data to be easily and readily used more than once. The more reusable data are, the more diverse the reuse of that data can be, for example in different systems or disciplines.

According to the FAIR principles: The potential of data to be reused, based on how richly they are annotated with accurate, standardised metadata including licensing and provenance information.

Semantically interoperable

The potential of agents to coordinate their activity by referencing a common understanding or system of knowledge.