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What Is HADatAc.org?

HADatAc.org is a community of scientists developing evidence-based open-source solutions to advance science. We believe on the construction, dissemination and reuse of knowledge graphs (KGs) built from data as a better approach for sharing scientific data instead of using datasets. Data encoded into KGs are contextualized along with any piece of knowledge that may be required for a human or a machine to understand and correctly reuse the data. 

The use of semantic data dictionaries is one of the pillars of our approach to build KGs from existing datasets. The registration of instruments into semantic instrument repositories is another pillar of our approach since the semantic registration of instruments allows any data collected through registered instruments to be semantically annotated without the need of developing dataset-specific semantic data dictionaries.   

In ours semantic solutions, we use the vocabulary of a collection of ontologies to describe scientific studies, study objects, and attributes of study objects. Human subjects and water samples are examples of study objects. Height of human subjects and pH of water samples are examples of attributes of study objects. 

This rich metadata collection encoded in KGs is thus leveraged by the HADatAc infrastructure to support the following: data management; data governance in terms of privacy, access and dissemination; uncertainty management; and (big) data analytics. Semantically annotated data encoded into KGs provide a number of key benefits:

  • Data selections can be base on rich variable specifications including categorical, spatial, and temporal conditions;
  • Data preparation can be fully automated without the use of complex ETL tools;
  • Data reuse can be based on semi-automated harmonization of variable specifications;