Bioschemas not registered in RDA Metadata Standards Catalog, causing FAIR assessment tools to miss it as a community standard #718
Description
Bioschemas not registered in RDA Metadata Standards Catalog, causing FAIR assessment tools to miss it as a community standard
Summary
Bioschemas is not listed in the [RDA Metadata Standards Catalog](https://rdamsc.bath.ac.uk/scheme-index) (RDA MSC). This causes automated FAIR assessment tools — specifically [F-UJI](https://github.com/pangaea-data-publisher/fuji) — to fail to recognize Bioschemas as a community-specific standard, even when Bioschemas profile namespaces are correctly present in metadata.
As a result, implementers who follow Bioschemas best practices receive no credit for community standard usage under FAIR principle R1.3 ("Metadata follows a standard recommended by the target research community").
Background
F-UJI is a widely used automated FAIR assessment tool. For its R1.3 metric, it checks metadata namespaces against two external registries to identify community-specific standards:
- FAIRsharing — Bioschemas is registered here ([FAIRsharing.20sbr9](https://fairsharing.org/FAIRsharing.20sbr9))
- RDA Metadata Standards Catalog — Bioschemas is not registered
Even though Bioschemas appears in FAIRsharing, there is a separate URL matching issue in F-UJI where full profile URLs (e.g., https://bioschemas.org/profiles/Dataset/1.0-RELEASE) don't match the base-level registration (reported as [pangaea-data-publisher/fuji#581](pangaea-data-publisher/fuji#581)). Having Bioschemas registered in RDA MSC would provide a second matching path and strengthen Bioschemas' visibility as a recognized community standard across the FAIR tooling ecosystem.
Impact
We encountered this while assessing metadata from the [MIDAS Catalog](https://catalog.midasnetwork.us/) (infectious disease modeling resources). Our JSON-LD metadata declares conformance to Bioschemas Dataset Profile 1.0-RELEASE and includes the namespace in @context. F-UJI's I2 metric (semantic resources) successfully detects the Bioschemas namespace as active, but R1.3 (community standards) does not match it — classifying only generic standards like Dublin Core and Schema.org. This is likely affecting any implementer using Bioschemas profiles.
Request
Would the Bioschemas team consider submitting Bioschemas to the RDA Metadata Standards Catalog? The submission form is at [rdamsc.bath.ac.uk](https://rdamsc.bath.ac.uk/) and their [scope criteria](https://rdamsc.bath.ac.uk/scope) require that a scheme "is used independently by at least two organizations" — which Bioschemas easily meets given its adoption across ELIXIR, EBI, UniProt, and many others documented on the [Live Deploys](https://bioschemas.org/developer/liveDeploys) page.
The submission would be most accurate coming from the Bioschemas maintainers, who can provide authoritative details on governance, versioning, and specification structure.
Related
- F-UJI issue on profile URL matching: [pangaea-data-publisher/fuji#581](Bioschemas profile URLs not matched as community-specific standard in R1.3 despite detection in I2 pangaea-data-publisher/fuji#581)
- FAIRsharing entry: [FAIRsharing.20sbr9](https://fairsharing.org/FAIRsharing.20sbr9)
- RDA MSC full index (Bioschemas absent): [rdamsc.bath.ac.uk/scheme-index](https://rdamsc.bath.ac.uk/scheme-index)