Schema Playground: A tool for authoring, extending, and using metadata schemas to improve FAIRness of biomedical data

BACKGROUND: Biomedical researchers are strongly encouraged to make their research outputs more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). While many biomedical research outputs are more readily accessible through open data efforts, finding relevant outputs remains a significant challenge. Schema.org is a metadata vocabulary standardization project that enables web content creators to make their content more FAIR. Leveraging schema.org could benefit biomedical research resource providers, but it can be challenging to apply schema.org standards to biomedical research outputs. We created an online browser-based tool that empowers researchers and repository developers to utilize schema.org or other biomedical schema projects. RESULTS: Our browser-based tool includes features which can help address many of the barriers towards schema.org-compliance such as: The ability to easily browse for relevant schema.org classes, the ability to extend and customize a class to be more suitable for biomedical research outputs, the ability to create data validation to ensure adherence of a research output to a customized class, and the ability to register a custom class to our schema registry enabling others to search and re-use it. We demonstrate the use of our tool with the creation of the Outbreak.info schema—a large multi-class schema for harmonizing various COVID-19 related resources. CONCLUSIONS: We have created a browser-based tool to empower biomedical research resource providers to leverage schema.org classes to make their research outputs more FAIR.