FAIR Signposting and FAIR Digital Objects (FDO)

FAIR Signposting is a way to provide explicit navigations to the constituent parts of resources, e.g. from a HTML landing page as redirected from a persistent identifier.

The below example shows how the signposting is provided as part of the WorkflowHub entry for a workflow.

curl --head https://workflowhub.eu/workflows/419

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 30731
Link: <https://workflowhub.eu/workflows/419?version=1> ;
      rel="describedby" ;
      type="application/vnd.datacite.datacite+xml",
  <https://workflowhub.eu/workflows/419?version=1> ;
      rel="describedby" ;
      type="application/ld+json",
  <https://workflowhub.eu/workflows/419/ro_crate?version=1> ;
      rel="item" ;
      type="application/zip" ;
      profile="https://w3id.org/ro/crate"

This provides navigation to the DataCite XML, Bioschemas JSON-LD and RO-Crate.

The signposting-py library and command line tool can be used as an example of programmatic use of the Signposting headers:

$ signposting https://doi.org/10.48546/workflowhub.workflow.624.1
Signposting for https://workflowhub.eu/workflows/624?version=1 
CiteAs: <https://doi.org/10.48546/workflowhub.workflow.624.1>
DescribedBy: <https://workflowhub.eu/workflows/624?version=1> application/vnd.datacite.datacite+xml
             <https://workflowhub.eu/workflows/624?version=1> application/ld+json
Item: <https://workflowhub.eu/workflows/624/ro_crate?version=1> application/zip

>>> import signposting
>>> s = signposting.find_signposting_http("https://doi.org/10.48546/workflowhub.workflow.624.1")
>>> [i.target for i in s.items]
['https://workflowhub.eu/workflows/624/ro_crate?version=1']

FAIR Digital Objects

Use of Signposting with WorkflowHub and RO-Crate pioneered the use of Lightweight FAIR Digital Objects.