The (long) journey from supporting information to Publishing and Finding FAIR data in chemistry

Electronic supporting information had its origins in the early to mid 1990s and it has evolved in a highly ad hoc manner since then. The concept of FAIR data arose about five years ago to try in part to rationalise the chaotic state of ESI. The talk will illustrate these developments by presenting a case study illustrating how one (either human or AI) might use the properties of FAIR to "F"ind some highly focused chemical spectroscopic and computational data. I will conclude by trying to unpick some of the supporting infrastructures which enable this and how the creators of the data facilitate this by using metadata to describe and then publish the data. The talk incorporates some elements of FAIR by having its own metadata and its own persistent identifier (as a DOI): https://doi.org/ff6g so that you can yourself Find, Access, Interoperate, Re-use and Cite it as appropriate.