2BFAIR: Framework for Automated FAIRness Assessment

The FAIR Principles intend to act as guidelines to enhance the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability of digital objects. Identifying how close a digital object is to abiding by the FAIR principles’ characteristics (i.e., compute its FAIRness) is a challenge tackled by several automated tools. However, no such tools fully support the main requirements for automated assessment, primarily the customization of the FAIRness evaluation according to community needs. This work presents 2BFAIR, a framework for automated FAIRness assessment. As a framework, 2BFAIR provides points of flexibility that its users can customize to fit a community’s specific needs of FAIRness evaluation. On the other hand, 2BFAIR encapsulates complex logic common to a family of related issues required by any FAIRness evaluation into pieces of code that the user does not have to change to create a tool based on 2BFAIR. We provide 2BFAIR with a default implementation, i.e., a tool implemented using the 2BFAIR framework. We analyzed this tool against the tools of the state-of-the-practice to demonstrate the usefulness of 2BFAIR. 2BFAIR supports 87% of the requirements that automated tools for FAIRness assessment should meet while other tools reach at most 74%. It makes 2BFAIR a good choice for implementing tools tailored to community needs.