FAIRsharing record for: FAIR Principles I2: (meta)data use vocabularies that follow FAIR principles

This FAIRsharing record describes: 'FAIR Principles I2: (meta)data use vocabularies that follow FAIR principles' uses “vocabularies” as the methods for unambiguous representation of concepts that exist in a given domain. The use of shared, and formally structured (principle I1), sets of terms is an essential part of FAIR. Terminology systems, including flat “vocabularies”, hierarchical “thesauri” and more granular specifications of knowledge such as data models and consistently structured ontologies, play an important role in community standards. However, the vocabularies used for metadata or data also need to be FAIR in their own right so that users (including machines) can fully understand the meaning of the terms used in the metadata. I2 requires that the vocabulary terms used in the knowledge representation language (principle I1) can be sufficiently distinguished, by a machine, to resolve to the intended defined meaning and thus ensure detection and prevention of “false agreements” as well as “false disagreements” on exact meaning of the identifier. (Text modified from: see reference URL.)