FAIR Reality Check

HMC FAIR Friday

Speaker: Sebastian Hellmann and Jan Forberg, University of Leipzig

Title: FAIR Reality Check: Cost–Benefit and Tooling for Effective Research Data Infrastructure

Date: Friday, 27 March 2026, 10:00 AM-11:00 AM (CET)

More than a decade after the introduction of the FAIR Principles and after billions of euros invested in research data infrastructure, a fundamental question remains: What value has FAIR actually delivered to researchers?

In this talk we take a pragmatic perspective and examine the microeconomics of FAIR adoption. Researchers constantly balance effort, cost, and administrative burden against the practical benefits they receive. We revisit lessons learned from the past decade and discuss which practices and tooling genuinely reduce friction while increasing the value of research data.

Building on this analysis, we present the design philosophy behind the open-source tools Databus and MOSS, developed in the DBpedia ecosystem. These tools enable organizations to build distributed data catalogs with collaborative metadata annotations and tailored search capabilities, aiming to provide tangible value to researchers while keeping the effort required for FAIR data management as low as possible. In addition, both systems are designed to be increasingly operable and maintainable by AI agents, enabling automated metadata curation, catalog management, and dataset integration workflows.

The presentation is aimed at research infrastructure administrators, data stewards, and platform maintainers who are responsible for implementing FAIR systems that genuinely support researchers rather than adding additional complexity.

About the speaker:

Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Hellmann is a knowledge engineer, specializing in Semantic Web technologies, knowledge graphs, and data infrastructures. He is director of the DBpedia Association and the Knowledge Integration and Linked Data (KILT) competence center at InfAI – Institute for Applied Informatics in Leipzig. He has led the development of several open infrastructures for publishing, integrating, and managing large-scale knowledge graph datasets. His work focuses on building sustainable data platforms and tools that bridge research, open data communities, and industrial applications, including systems such as Databus and MOSS for FAIR data publishing, discovery and data quality management.

Jan Forberg is a software engineer and lead developer working on scalable infrastructure for Linked Data and knowledge graphs within the DBpedia ecosystem. He focuses on the design and implementation of open-source systems for managing large datasets and semantic data infrastructures. He is responsible for the architecture and development of core components such as Databus/MOSS and related tooling used in production environments. His work combines research-driven development with practical deployment of robust data infrastructure.

Registration open until 17 March 2026, 09:45 AM (CET): https://events.hifis.net/event/3754
(For organizational reasons, we cannot guarantee participation for registrations after 09:45 am)

The Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC) invites you to engage in an exciting series of talks on FAIR Data through the HMC FAIR Friday lecture series. Renowned experts from around the world will present key aspects of FAIR data, offering deep dives into the topic and sparking discussions on best practices and new perspectives. HMC FAIR Friday is aimed at professionals in research data management as well as researchers from all disciplines of the Helmholtz Association and beyond, who want to learn more about the importance and implementation of FAIR principles.