Nordic FAIR data stewardship workshop 2023

We hereby announce the first workshop on FAIR data management in the Nordics, hosted by NeIC. This is a second (and final) attempt at organising such an event and networking opportunity for data stewards and data professionals. Note that you may register now and will only be required to pay for your participation in the second half of September (by which time the event will be confirmed or cancelled, depending on the number of registrations).

The full event runs over 4,5 days (Nov 13-17, 2023) and is intended for individuals who already have taken the intro course organised by NeIC in the past years or worked as data stewards and wish to develop and refine their skills in working with FAIR data management. 

The event consist of three parts; i) the first day and a half is a recap of certain FAIR data stewardship skills needed for the exercises on Nov 14, where one or more use-cases will be used demonstrate the steps needed for the FAIRification processs, ii) the second part is in the format of a workshop where participants are invited to share their experiences working as data stewards, data curators or other data management professionals. We will also host a discussion on future course curriculum, training needs, and lastly the third part is a unique advanced training opportunity  – a course on conceptual data modelling, FAIR ontologies and interoperability provided by Prof. G. Guizzardi.

You can select which part you wish to sign-up for (the workshop, Nov 15, is free of charge).

The programme is as follows:

Venue:

Ole-Johan Dahls hus

University of Oslo, Gaustadalleén 23B

Map

Lunch and snacks / drink during breaks are included.

Participants need to arrange their own accommodation. 

It is recommended that you only reserve accommodation (with the option of cancelling) until the event is confirmed, at the latest by Sep 15, 2023).

Note that we will attempt to request payments only after Sept 15, when and if the event is confirmed. 

We encourage you to register asap and before Sep 15 in order to secure the event being executed as planned (or to take advantage of the early-bird rebate).

In the event of cancellation, any charged amount (in NOK) will be refunded (only exception is payments made by transfer/invoice which will require longer processing and the fee will not be refunded).

FAIRification; planning & execution

The methodology first identifies the goals for the FAIRification, then which principles can be used to satisfy the goals, then define which actions will be taken to realise the involved principles. A pre-defined use case is used to illustrate the process of FAIRification, including planning  the concrete actions, expected FAIRness level to be achieved etc.

November 13

• 1300-1700: Recap FAIRification process (Linked Data and Semantic Web)

November 14

• 0900-1030: Introduction to the FAIRification methodology (1h30)
• 1045-1215: FAIRification planning: objectives elicitation (practical/interactive) (1h30)
• 1300-1430: FAIRification planning: identification of involved principles and concrete actions (practical/interactive) (1h30)
• 1445-1600: FAIRification planning: practicing the concrete actions (practical/interactive) and discussion of the next steps (1h30)

WORKSHOP

Plenary discussion

We start this workshop with an open discussion on experiences and challenges perceived among the participants related to data stewardship in real-world situations and durring the second half of the day look to the future on topics of skills and tools development? 

November 15

• 0900 - 1200 Invited speakers on lessons learned from data stewardship
• 1200 - 1300 LUNCH
• 1300 - 1700 Discussion on common challenges, competence development needs and more

Advanced course - FAIR ontologies engineering

For data resources to be FAIR, they must be sufficiently and appropriately described and structured with FAIR metadata resources, in particular, with FAIR ontologies. Ontologies play a key role in data interoperability but, for that, they must themselves be designed for interoperability. The main objective of this course is to introduce practitioners to the theory and practice of Ontology Engineering in general, and the engineering of FAIR ontologies, in particular. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the development and use of these truly interoperable ontologies in areas such as, for example, Finances, Robotics, Cybersecurity, Industry 4.0, IoT, Digital Twins. However, as we demonstrate in this course, an approach for ontology construction uniquely based on logical languages (e.g., OWL, RDFS) is insufficient to address a number of semantic interoperability problems that arise in open and dynamic scenarios. We then show that these languages should be complemented by a language and methodology based on a Foundational Ontology, i.e., a domain-independent common- sense theory constructed by aggregating suitable contributions from areas such as philosophical ontology and logics, cognitive science and linguistics. In this course, we give an introduction to such a theoretically well-founded ontology representation language, namely, OntoUML. Moreover, we present a number of advanced modelling techniques, such as ontology design patterns, anti-patterns, and methodological guidelines, based on the foundations of this language, and show how they can be used to solve some classical and recurrent modelling problems that (re)appear in concrete application scenarios. Finally, we show how OntoUML ontologies can be properly translated to OWL using the gUFO framework.

November 16

• 0900-1030: Ontologies, Semantic Interoperability and the “I” of FAIR (1:30)
• 1045-1230: A Brief Introduction to Conceptual Modeling (1:45)
• 1230-1315 LUNCH
• 1315-1500: Types and Taxonomic Structures (1:45)
• 15:15-17:00: Model Refactoring and Model Quality, Practical exercises (1:45)

November 17

• 0900-1045: Dependent Types and Complex Relations (1:45)
• 1100-1245: Events, Higher-Order Types, Practical exercises (1:45)
• 1245-1345 LUNCH
• 1345-1515: Model Validation, Ontology Patterns and Anti-Patterns (1:30)
• 1530-1700: Ontology Implementation using gUFO (1:30)

NOTE: The organiser reserves the right to cancel the event at the latest by Sep 15, 2023 if registrations have not exceeded 20 participants for the workshop and 10 particpants for the advanced course. In such case registrants will be refunded the registration fee to the same payment card they used when registrering (or to provided account if payed by invoice). If the participant wishes to cancel their participation, a refund will be requested from the platform minus the administration fee (3%), which is non-refundable in case of cancellation by the participant.