Beyond Simple FAIR Principles for Ontologies and Semantic Resources: Grounding Rich, Meaningful Metadata

Digital forms of metadata such as controlled vocabularies, taxonomies and conceptual models play an important role in ensuring that data satisfy the principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR). In turn, metadata also relies on semantic artifacts called formal ontologies to make metadata computer processable. Ontologies make metadata semantically rich with axiomatized definitions that represent useful meanings, but adapting simple ideas of FAIRness for a broad class of digital objects called semantic resources, especially ontologies, raises a number of semantic issues. The focus here is on issues involving community standards for rich metadata and adequate grounding of these with meaningful semantics. This comes despite the fact that in many ways, ontology developments have preceded, and proceeded well beyond, simple FAIR principles. We illustrate the value of community standards by the development of capabilities to document ontology modules sharing a common framework. As part of grounding semantics, we suggest a useful direction is to capture the form of axiom patterns using common ontology design patterns, which are themselves grounded in foundational concepts.