FAIRsharing record for: FAIR Principles I1: (meta)data use a formal, accessible, shared, and broadly applicable language for knowledge representation

This FAIRsharing record describes: 'FAIR Principles I1: (meta)data use a formal, accessible, shared, and broadly applicable language for knowledge representation' is concerned with achieving a “common understanding” of digital resources through a globally understood “language” for machines, with an emphasis on “knowledge” and “knowledge representation”. This becomes critical when many differently formatted resources need to be visited or combined across organizations and countries and is especially challenging for interdisciplinary studies or for meta-analyses, where results from independent organizations, pertaining to the same topic, must be combined. In this context, the principle says that producers of digital resources are required to use a language (i.e., a representation of data/knowledge) that has a defined mechanism for mechanized interpretation – a machine-readable “grammar” – where, for example, the difference between an entity, as well as any relevant relationship between entities, is defined in the structure of the language itself. This allows machines to consume the information with at least a basic “understanding” of its content. It is a step towards a common understanding of digital resources by machines, which is a prerequisite for a functional Internet of FAIR Data and Services. (Text modified from: see reference URL.)