A Strategic Community Roadmap for an Australian FAIR Vocabulary Ecosystem

Abstract

Vocabularies serve as essential anchor points for both humans and machines in effective and efficient data processing. Vocabularies include controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, and metadata schemas, each of which contributes to an ecosystem that encompasses the people, resources, standards, tools, platforms, policies, and practices that make them accessible and useful for researchers. Currently, Australia’s vocabulary ecosystem is fragmented and lacks effective coordination. To address these challenges, a Vocabulary Workshop was held in 2022, sponsored by the Australian Data Archive, the Australian Research Data Commons, and CODATA. From this workshop, a proposal for a strategic roadmap emerged, followed by numerous community consultations conducted between 2022 and 2024. The resulting Strategic Community Roadmap outlines a pathway for Australia to transition from its fragmented landscape to a cohesive and dynamic FAIR Vocabulary Ecosystem. It presents a Vision, Mission, and 57 recommendations categorised into seven key topics, organised around four Strategic Themes. Each recommendation is prioritised by its importance and urgency for implementation. The goal is to promote wider adoption and greater community engagement with machine-actionable vocabularies, emphasising the social and technical support needed to address current data interoperability challenges. This serves as a call to action to maximise the societal, economic, and environmental benefits that can be derived from our national research and data initiatives.