FAIR vocabularies

Agricultural vocabularies should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR).

What are agricultural vocabularies and what is their purpose?

Vocabs are curated lists of definitions of terms used to help describe data. They enable data discovery and integration within and across domains and data communities. One of the FAIR principles states that (meta-)data should use vocabularies.

Why should vocabularies be FAIR?

Vocabs are a digital assets and part of the FAIR ecosystem. They need to be findable, accessible, interoperable and resusable so they can used to describe FAIR datasets.

What makes a vocabulary FAIR?

To be findable, it needs to be indexed and listed in a vocabulary service.
To be accessible, it needs to be available and downloadable on the Internet.
To be ineroperable, it needs to be encoded in a standard format, which could be OWL (Web Ontology Language, SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System)
To be resusable, it must have a license (preferably open) and be maintained.