Metroline Step: Use ontologies in the data model

Owned by Sander de Ridder
Last updated: Sept 20, 2024
2 min read

status: On Hold On 17-9-2024 it was decided to put this page on hold and focus on describing the petal process first. When that part is finished, parts of the information (see e.g. step 4) will be generalised for this page.

Short description 

Isn’t this part of the “Create or reuse a semantic (meta)data model” step?

Skipping for now…

[FAIRopoly]

This step aims at assigning machine-readable terms from existing ontologies to metadata and CDEs. Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) should be used to identify and refer to each term without ambiguity.

Domain ontologies are used to describe data that is specific to a particular domain. For example, use ncit:sex from National Cancer Institute Thesaurus (NCIT) to describe the “sex” data element, and ncit:male to describe the “male” value of “sex” element.

The deliverable should be documented bindings of appropriate terms to metadata and data elements so that their semantics can be expressed in a machine-readable fashion.

Why is this step important 

This section should explain why this step is crucial 

How to 

The How to section should:

  • be split into easy to follow steps;

    • Step 1

    • Step 2

    • etc.

  • help the reader to complete the step;

  • aspire to be readable for everyone, but, depending on the topic, may require specialised knowledge;

  • be a general, widely applicable approach;

  • if possible / applicable, add (links to) the solution necessary for onboarding in the Health-RI National Catalogue;

  • aim to be practical and simple, while keeping in mind: if I would come to this page looking for a solution to this problem, would this How-to actually help me solve this problem;

  • contain references to solutions such as those provided by FAIR Cookbook, RMDkit, Turing way and FAIR Sharing;

  • contain custom recipes/best-practices written by/together with experts from the field if necessary. 

Expertise requirements for this step 

This section could describe the expertise required. Perhaps the Build Your Team step could then be an aggregation of all the “Expertise requirements for this step” steps that someone needs to fulfil his/her FAIRification goals.  

Practical examples from the community 

Examples of how this step is applied in a project (link to demonstrator projects).  

Training

Add links to training resources relevant for this step. Since the training aspect is still under development, currently many steps have “Relevant training will be added in the future if available.”

Suggestions

Visit our How to contribute page for information on how to get in touch if you have any suggestions about this page.