Q: Is this project active? Is it possible to publish a dataset in a FAIR Data Point?

[vemonet]

The Question

Hi @MarekSuchanek we are wondering if the FAIR Data Point project still active?

Because currently most issues in this GitHub repository have no answers

When we look at the list of current FDP: https://home.fairdatapoint.org
We can see that a lot of people (including us) deployed publicly available FAIR Data Point, but got discouraged by the instability and lack of basic features (cf. other GitHub issues)

If we take a look at the list of published FDP it is quite stricking: https://home.fairdatapoint.org/

On the 164 FDP that were publicly deployed (this shows there is a need and crave for such service at least), only 24 are still active

And when we look more closely at a few of those 24 FAIR Data Point, more than half are obviously not used in practice:

• https://fdp.sdsc.edu : no catalog created
• https://zks-docker.ukl.uni-freiburg.de/fairdatapoint : no datasets created
• http://178.63.49.197:8050 : there is a test catalog
• https://fdp.x-omics.nl : 1 dataset, no distribution
• https://twoc.fair-dtls.surf-hosted.nl : 1 dataset, with 1 SPARL distribution
• https://w3id.org/duchenne-fdp : only 1 distribution defined
• https://app.fairdatapoint.org : a few test datasets
• https://diamonds.tno.nl/fairdatapoint : 1 "SPARQL distribution" for a "Synthetic Data" dataset (this dataset/distribution combination can be found in a few other FDP, so not sure it's a really used dataset
• https://fdp.knowcean.eu : 1 dataset, no distribution
• https://fdp.cmbi.umcn.nl : 1 dataset, no distribution
• http://178.63.49.197:8070 : not for storing dataset, just list 3 other active endpoints (used for Rare Disease datasets)
• http://193.166.24.131:5000 : 1 dataset
• https://fdp.uc.rnu.tn : can't reach the URL

We tried to include datasets from the rare FAIR Data Points that were hosting actual data that are not quick tests (e.g. https://w3id.org/ejp-rd/fairdatapoints/wp13 ) to some testing workflow, the problem is that FAIR Data Point is so unstable (that's why we stopped trying to deploy one on our servers) that every now and then the FDP is down and breaks our tests until it's back up

We would like to publish a dataset in a FDP but we don't want to maintain it's deployment (it's a lot of work to fix it every week/month just to have basic DCAT RDF description available for a dataset).

Is there a way to do so?

Extension part
Overall

Additional context

[luizbonino]

Hi Vincent, thanks for reaching out. The FAIR Data Point has been created to be a set of specifications on how to expose metadata following the FAIR principles. However, at that time people had difficulties in grasping the ideas and we decided to invest in a reference implementation as an example of how the specifications can be implemented. Because of this characteristic, we focused on the FAIR features instead of usability improvements. I'd say that this goal was reached with a significant increase of interest on the tool. Moreover, as far as I know, we currently have 5 different implementations of the specs, including our own. Now we are refocusing on usability, robustness and flexibility, which, hopefully, will reduce the instability.

Regarding the FDPs registered in the FDP index, even when someone deploys the reference implementation in a laptop, it gets registered but it is unreachable. In other cases, people deploy a FDP for tests without entering metadata records of real resources. This is beyond our control as we have the https://home.fairdatapoint.org as a demonstration deployment of the FDP index, which can also be deployed by anyone, offering different FDP indexes.

Last year, a commercial company started to offer the deployment of FDPs in the cloud (www.fairdatasolutions.com). This may be a direction for those who want to use the service but don't want or can't maintain a deployment.

[markwilkinson]

Hey Vincent! You might want to try again now... The FDP is being actively used for the EJP-RD project (and for my company!) and it's very stable! I'm running... 7? FDPs, as well as an independent FDP index (and the EJP project is running several FDP index servers). You might be pleased with how robust it all is!

Best wishes to you!

Mark

[markwilkinson]

B.t.w. I have created an installer for FDPs (called "FAIR in a box" - FiaB search on GitHub). It will install everything correctly, but it will also install a lot of other stuff that you likely don't need. Just delete those parts of the docker compose to get the "pure" FDP (fdp, client, graphdb, and mongo). It also namespaces everything so that you can run multiple FDPs on the same server. Hope that helps!

[vemonet]

Hi @markwilkinson ! Thanks for the update, CDE is an interesting system, I will look more into it if we need something like this

Btw I noticed something you will probably like: markwilkinson/FAIR-in-a-box#4