FDO One – FAIR Digital Object One

The FDO One project aims to enhance the use of digital assets across all sectors of society: industry, science, and the public sector, by focusing on three core areas:

1. the transfer of assets into secure, trustworthy AI applications;
2. strengthening trust in AI through reproducibility; and
3. enhancing the AI ecosystem by defining and improving the framework conditions for companies.

FDO stands for FAIR Digital Object, which embodies the principles of being Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. Learn more about FDOs at https://fairdo.org/

A significant challenge identified by the project is the vast generation of digital assets that are not adherent to FAIR principles. The project aims to establish a virtual data space to enable efficient access to meaningful assets and convert them into AI-ready collections, with comprehensive documentation linkage. Another challenge is that the data space landscape is highly fragmented, both technologically and regulatorily, which poses barriers to interoperability and cross-border data flows, that are crucial for large commercial entities. 

FDOs offer a potential standard for networking these data spaces. However, their practical application and integration with existing technologies like those of the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA), Eclipse Dataspace Components (EDC), and Asset Administration Shell (AAS) still require rigorous testing, which is especially critical in security-sensitive scenarios to ensure seamless functionality across diverse data ecosystems.

The FDO One project is focused on leveraging FAIR Digital Objects (FDOs) to enhance networking across diverse data spaces, effectively addressing the issues of data fragmentation and interoperability. The solutions designed within the project encompass two key areas:

• Architectural and Technological Integration: The project aims to develop an optimized architectural framework that aligns with existing technologies like IDSA (EDC) and Industry 4.0 (AAS). This involves conceptualizing a design that supports optimal networking by considering the specific requirements of these established architectures.
• Practical Implementation of FDOs: The core of the solution is the demonstration of FDO capabilities through a practical use case. This involves the development of adapters to integrate FDOs with relevant technologies and the implementation of these adapters in a demonstrator. The project focuses on ensuring that both metadata and the data itself are considered in the exchange process, emphasizing syntactic and semantic interoperability.

The role of Fraunhofer in the project is the development and implementation of EDC-related technologies to enable the exchange of FDO assets.

• Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT
• Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering
• Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen (GWDG) - Society for scientific data processing
• IndiScale GmbH
• RWTH Aachen University
• DIN e.V. (German Institute for Standardization)