Terminology

Terminology plays an important role not only for communication among experts, but also for searching and finding relevant resources, e.g. scientific publications, data sets, projects or researchers.

Specialized terminology is used to describe such resources and their contents, topics or research areas - and thus becomes part of their metadata.

Specialized terminology should therefore be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable - in other words, it should follow the FAIR principles for persistent reference and unambiguous use.

Modern terminologies are developed following standards of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) so that digital services can process and interprete them. The spectrum ranges from lightweight controlled vocabularies to logically formalized ontologies.
These standards include e.g.

• the Resource Description Framework (RDF),
• the Resource Description Framework Schema (RDFS),
• the Web Ontology Language (OWL),
• or the SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System.

Do you have questions about using FAIR terminologies in research data management or about creating FAIR terminologies?

We recommend the following resources to get you started:

• Dean Allemang, James Hendler (2020): Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist.
• Antoine Isaac & Ed Summers (2009): SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Primer.
• Angelina Kraft (2017): The FAIR Data principles for research data.
• Philippe Rocca-Serra & Alasdair Gray (2022): Introduction to terminologies and ontologies. In: Philippe Rocca-Serra et al. (eds.): D2.1 FAIR Cookbook.

FID BAUdigital develops terminology in the fields of civil engineering, architecture and urbanism with a focus on digital methods, models them according to the SKOS standard and publishes them as FAIR digital resources for

• reuse in the services of FID BAUdigital,
• reuse by other services (e.g. NFDI consortia such as NFDI4Ing),
• reuse by researchers specializing in digital methods in civil engineering, architecture and urbanism.

FID BAUdigital has published the following terminologies on GitLab.com so far:

• Findex Raum,
• Findex Bau, and
• FID BAUdigital Subject Headings.

TIB Terminology Service is a web service that provides access to terms from general and domain-specific controlled vocabularies and ontologies. FID BAUdigital provides a selection of domain-specific terminologies.

Explore TIB Terminology Service