The Terms4FAIRskills project continued its engagement with the wider community with two more hack sessions on the 27th and 29th January 2021. Building on the work of the the last two hack sessions in December 2020, the project core team – Yann Le Franc, Pete McQuilton and Laura Molloy – once again welcomed colleagues from the FAIRsFAIR project, FAIRsharing, ELIXIR, EOSC-Life, the Digital Curation Centre, DANS, CINES and CODATA to find out more about the Semaphora annotation plugin, derived from the EOSC semantic annotation service, B2NOTE, and how it works with a revised version of the Terms4FAIRskills terminology to describe online training resources.
Once installation was successfully completed, participants were enthusiastic about the ease with which they were able to choose from existing terms and suggest their own terms to annotate their training materials with their own choice of FAIR-related skills and competences. Participants were also pleased to be able to search annotations on the Semaphora plugin, making it easier to find appropriate training materials for their needs. As always, the core team learned a lot from the lively discussion throughout the sessions, and we are once again working with the feedback from participants to improve both the terminology and the annotation tool.
Dr Angus Whyte, Senior Institutional Support Officer, reflected: “This felt like a very useful session to me. Having the Semaphora tool made quite a difference. It was quite helpful that it hides the hierarchical structure in the terminology, as we know that is a work-in-progress. The value of the work that has gone into distilling the terms was pretty clear, as was the ease of using the tool. A bit of practice with the annotation helped too. It takes a bit of discipline to be economical with the choice of terms to tag an item with. And we had an interesting and useful discussion about the level of granularity at which the annotation is most helpful.”
Prof Hugh Shanahan, Professor of Open Science at Royal Holloway, University of London, agreed: “The sessions were enormously helpful in understanding what’s been achieved because of the EOSC [co-creation] funding. The project has reached a significant level of maturity and it’s much clearer now what the finished project will look like as a tool for annotating and finding FAIR related training materials.”
We are currently planning a final remote sprint to complete this phase of activity for which we are grateful to have received funds from the EOSC Co-creation award.
For further information about the terminology, please see the terms4FAIRskills website, follow the #terms4FAIRskills hashtag on Twitter and/or email terms4FAIRskills@codata.org.
