What is FAIR Data informatics?

FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. The FAIR Data Principles were published in 2016 and provided high level guidance on how to make data more usable for both humans and machines. FDI’s mission is to make research data more FAIR through development of technology, services and policy— thereby improving accuracy, reproducibility, and analysis in biomedical research all over the world.

History of the FDI Laboratory:

The FDI Lab began as NIF, the Neuroscience Information Framework, an initiative of the NIH Blueprint Consortium.  NIF has been cataloging and surveying the neuroscience resource landscape since 2006.  It developed the largest catalog of digital resources on the web, and has tracked their development and usage.  NIF also developed one of the first data search engines, allowing users to search across 100’s of biomedical databases from a single interface.  

Recognizing that many biomedical domains faced similar problems in making data searchable and their constituents aware of resources available to them, we generalized our infrastructure to support additional biomedical domains.  With support from NIH National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), we developed SciCrunch, a flexible platform for creating customized data portals that can draw from a common pool of resources. When data is added to one portal, it becomes available to all. SciCrunch powers the dkNET portal, developed for researchers in digestive, diabetes and kidney diseases, as well as several other projects.  NIF and dkNET also launched the Resource Identification Initiative, leveraging the SciCrunch infrastructure and our comprehensive resource registries to provide unique identifiers for research resources-antibodies, cell lines, digital resources, organisms and biosamples-in the biomedical literature.

We currently support a range of scientific projects, primarily in biomedicine, providing technical, scientific and curatorial expertise to ensure that scientific data can be put to use.

The FDI Lab is a leader in promoting and developing tools for open, FAIR and collaborative science, working through community organizations such as FORCE11, the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility, and others.