DREAM Principles and FAIR Metrics from the PORTAL-DOORS Project for the Semantic Web

Articles published in Scientific Data by Wilkinson et al. argued for the adoption of the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles of data management without citing any of the prior work published by Taswell. However, these principles were first proposed and described by Taswell in 2006 as the foundation for work on the PORTAL-DOORS Project (PDP) and the Nexus-PORTAL-DOORS-Scribe (NPDS) cyberinfrastructure, and have been published in numerous conference presentations, journal articles, and patents. This work on PDP and NPDS has been continuously available since 2007 from a publicly accessible web site at www.portaldoors.org, and discussed in person at conferences with several key authors of the Wilkinson et al. papers. Paraphrasing without citing the PDP and NPDS principles while renaming them as the FAIR principles raises questions about both the ‘FAIRness’ and the fairness of the authors of the Wilkinson et al. papers. Promoting these principles with the use of the term ‘metrics’, which are not metrics by definition of the term metric as used in most fields of science, also raises questions about their commitment to maintaining consistency of usage for basic terminology across different fields of science as should be expected for terms in ontology mapping with knowledge engineering for the semantic web. Therefore, in the present report, we clarify the origin of their FAIR principles by identifying our PDP and NPDS principles that constitute the historical precedent for their FAIR principles. Moreover, as the comprehensively summarizing phrase for all of our PDP and NPDS principles, we rename them the DREAM principles with the acronym DREAM for Discoverable Data with Reproducible Results for Equivalent Entities with Accessible Attributes and Manageable Metadata. Finally, we define numerically valid quantitative FAIR metrics to monitor and measure the DREAM principles from the perspective of the most important principle, ie, the Fair Acknowledgment of Information Records and Fair Attribution to Indexed Reports, for maintaining fair standards of citation in scholarly research and publishing.