Q: Is this project active? Is it possible to publish a dataset in a FAIR Data Point? about fairdatapoint

[luizbonino]

Hi Vincent, thanks for reaching out. The FAIR Data Point has been created to be a set of specifications on how to expose metadata following the FAIR principles. However, at that time people had difficulties in grasping the ideas and we decided to invest in a reference implementation as an example of how the specifications can be implemented. Because of this characteristic, we focused on the FAIR features instead of usability improvements. I'd say that this goal was reached with a significant increase of interest on the tool. Moreover, as far as I know, we currently have 5 different implementations of the specs, including our own. Now we are refocusing on usability, robustness and flexibility, which, hopefully, will reduce the instability.

Regarding the FDPs registered in the FDP index, even when someone deploys the reference implementation in a laptop, it gets registered but it is unreachable. In other cases, people deploy a FDP for tests without entering metadata records of real resources. This is beyond our control as we have the https://home.fairdatapoint.org as a demonstration deployment of the FDP index, which can also be deployed by anyone, offering different FDP indexes.

Last year, a commercial company started to offer the deployment of FDPs in the cloud (www.fairdatasolutions.com). This may be a direction for those who want to use the service but don't want or can't maintain a deployment.