Autonomous FAIR Digital Objects From Passive Assertions to Active Knowledge

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)

Abstract

Title: Autonomous FAIR Digital Objects: From Passive Assertions to Active Knowledge (ISWC 2026 slides) Description:Slides for the research-track talk at the 25th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2026), Bari, Italy, in the session “FAIR, Decentralized, and Trustworthy Knowledge Infrastructures”. Published scientific knowledge stays online after the institutions that curated it close, but its curation stops. The talk presents Autonomous FAIR Digital Objects (aFDOs), FAIR Digital Objects that carry their own decision logic. A policy layer is expressed in W3C standards (SHACL, ODRL, RDF-star, PROV-O), an announcement layer uses ActivityStreams 2.0, and an agreement layer resolves conflicts between sources by weighting reputation and confidence. A step-by-step example shows one event flowing through subscription, policy evaluation, action and audit. The evaluation uses 3,914 real ClinVar conflicts that expert panels later adjudicated: the mechanism ties with simple majority overall (56.3% vs 56.6%) and does better on polarised conflicts (70.8% vs 55.4%). Results under Sybil, collusion and poisoning attacks are also reported, along with the current limitations. Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-42026-8_15Code: https://github.com/zeyd31/aFDO_ISWC (archived at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21903096) Keywords: FAIR Digital Objects; nanopublications; knowledge graphs; provenance; SHACL; ODRL; PROV-O; trust; ISWC 2026 Authors: Zeyd Boukhers, Oya Deniz Beyan, Cong Yang, Christoph LangeLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0

Authors 4

1. Zeyd Boukhers

   Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology

   Affiliation as printed

   Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology

2. Oya Beyan

   University of Cologne · Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft

   Affiliation as printed

   University of Cologne

   Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft

3. Cong Yang
4. Christoph Lange Aachen

   Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology · RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University

   Fraunhofer FIT