Recognising the value of this tool, the Government of Canada has developed its own version to support data management within its organisation.
Open and strategic data management
FAIR-Aware is an open source tool, which means that organisations and institutions can adapt it to their specific needs. This versatility allows for customised versions tailored to different domains, organisational policies or languages. For instance, a French version has previously been developed.
The Government of Canada (GC) has taken advantage of this feature by creating a version specifically for its employees, ensuring that data management practices align with the principles and requirements relevant to their governmental context.
Managing data according to the FAIR principles supports the open and strategic management of data, enhancing its reusability and promoting effective data stewardship across the GC, which is important for them. Taking measures to prepare data for reuse helps ensure that both the GC and the public can derive maximum value from it and use it to make evidence-based decisions. Enhancing data reusability allows for it to have an impact beyond its original purpose, such as enabling the use of automated decision systems and supporting the delivery of services.
Custom FAIR-Aware versions
Creating a customised version of FAIR-Aware will soon become even easier with the upcoming release of FAIR-Aware 2.0. In its most recent phase of development, the tool has been adapted to allow new versions to be easily made based on different metric specifications and languages. This increased flexibility reflects the reality in which FAIR knows many different interpretations and support is needed for a wide variety of different purposes. Discipline-specific, object-specific, and location-specific guidance can be developed and tested using the FAIR-Aware framework by anyone interested.
More details on this development can be found at the poster, presented at the IDCC25 and FAIRfest, and now available on Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14773480.
