What we do

We are working to facilitate the progressive implementation of FAIR principles by data managers and producers in agriculture and agri-food. Improved data management will facilitate interdisciplinarity and reproducibility of work while reducing data duplication. We are particularly interested in the application of FAIR principles to semantic resources (ontologies, thesauri…) which are themselves key elements for making data more FAIR (Principle I2).

Who we are

FooSIN is the result of long-standing collaborations between scientists, professionals in the field of Scientific and Technical Information and computer scientists from INRAE (formerly Inra and Irstea), the Laboratoire d’Informatique, de Robotique et de Microélectronique de Montpellier (LIRMM), IRD and CIRAD. The project is partly based on the work and exchanges that we have been conducting for several years within the Research Data Alliance (RDA), in the framework of the Interest Group on Data in Agriculture (IGAD) and the Agrisemantics Working Group in particular. During the FooSIN project, meet us at the RDA and Journées Nationales pour la Science Ouverte (JNSO) events.

The objectives of the project

The objective of the FooSIN project is to strengthen the participation of French actors in the Food Systems Implementation Network (IN) of GO FAIR in order to:

  • accelerate the implementation of the FAIR principles within the French agri-food community, and
  • position France as a leader in this development and make French actions and productions more visible at the international level

By addressing all data practitioners, the FAIR principles are also a means of facilitating exchanges between research, industry professionals, NGOs and citizens. As producers and users of data in turn, they all have much to gain: transparency, reasoning based on real or large-scale data, respect for privacy, and better consideration of societal expectations are among the expected impacts.

Our fields of action

Our project is organised according to the 3 pillars identified by the GO FAIR initiative

  • GO CHANGE: priorities, policies and incentives for the implementation of FAIR
    • involvement in GO FAIR and animation of Food Systems IN
    • evaluation of the motivations and means available for the implementation of the FAIR principles (in connection with the RDA SHARC group)
    • higlight of cases of implementation of FAIR principles in the French community
  • GO BUILD: technologies serving the FAIR principles
    • sharing tools for the FAIRisation of data and semantic resources
    • FAIRisation and publication of ontologies and thesaurus in the field
    • enhancement of a workflow for publishing genomics data in RDF
  • GO TRAIN: Awareness raising on FAIR, training and skills development
    • inventory on the place of FAIR principles in the training offer in Open Science in our organisations
    • participation in the organization of the 4th AgroHackathon