FAIR Signposting

Signposting the Scholarly Web

United States of America

Website

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About

Launched: 2020

Record Updated: Nov 07, 2024

Standard, specification or protocol

Landing pages support humans that interact with scholarly objects on the web, providing descriptive metadata and links to content. These pages are not optimized for use by machine agents that navigate the scholarly web. For example, how can a robot determine which links on the myriad of landing pages lead to content and which to metadata? FAIR Signposting caters to machine agents by providing this information, and more, in a standards-based way. It contributes to FAIR's Findable, Accessible, and Reusable by uniformly conveying to machines what the persistent identifier of a scholarly object is, where its landing page is, where and what its content is, where metadata that describes it is, and what the persistent identifier of its author is. It conveys this by means of a limited set of typed web links that have web locations (HTTP URIs) as their target.

Mission

There is little interoperability among scholarly repositories on the web. Most focus on access via the user interface. Some provide APIs for machine access, in which case each repository platform has its own. But how about some uniform approaches to allow machines to interact with repositories? Wouldn't that make it a lot easier/cheaper to implement cross-repository services? Understanding that resources are scarce, the "Signposting the Scholarly Web" effort provides really simple approaches that repositories can implement to improve machine accessibility of their content. It is not a formal standardization effort. It's an accumulation of ideas from people that have spent a lot of time thinking about the web and scholarly communication on the web, working on specifications to improve on the interoperability status quo. The specifications provided under the Signposting umbrella are fully aligned with hypermedia (REST, HATEOAS) lines of thinking regarding web interoperability.

Key Achievements

The "Signposting the Scholarly Web" effort started in 2016 by recommending patterns, based on typed links, that repositories can implement to make it easier for machines to navigate the scholarly objects they host. By 2024, the effort provides several specifications that repositories can implement to make their objects more accessible to machines. FAIR Signposting Profile provides a guideline with concrete recipes for the implementation of the Signposting patterns. FAIRiCat specifies the content, syntax, and discoverability of the FAIR Interoperability Catalogue, a static file that repositories can publish to advertise the interoperability affordances they provide, including repository-level and object-level affordances. Signmap shows how Sitemaps, that have been the dominant approach to help web crawlers find a server's resources since 2009, can be augmented to include Signposting links as a means to create a self-contained inventory of scholarly objects managed by a repository.

Technical Attributes

Maintenance Status

Actively Maintained

Technical Documentation

Implemented

Website

Technology Readiness Level

Actual system proven in operational environment

Content Licensing

Creative commons licenses

Standards

Persistent Identifier

DOI, handle, PURL, ark, ...

Community Engagement

Engagement with Values Frameworks

COAR Next Generation Repositories Principles

Policies & Governance

Policies

Board Structure

None

Board Level

There is no board.

Community Governance

Ad hoc

Additional Information

Organizational History

"Signposting the Scholarly Web" is not a formal standardization effort. It's an accumulation of ideas from people that have spent a lot of time thinking about the web and scholarly communication on the web, working on specifications to improve on the interoperability status quo, and witnessing some specifications being adopted and others not. From its outset in 2016, core contributors have been Herbert Van de Sompel, Michael L. Nelson, Shawn Jones, and Martin Klein. But input from others is actively solicited as exemplified by extensive authorship statements of the various specifications.

Organizational Structure

Business or Ownership Model

Other

Full-time Staff

Volunteers

1-5

Current Affiliations

Data Archiving Networked Services (DANS), Old Dominion University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Funding

Primary Funding Source

Volunteering

Funding Needs

Funding for outreach, advocacy of "Signposting the Scholarly Web" specifications would be helpful.