As part of modern research practices, the FAIR data principles have become essential for data discoverability, usability, and sharing.Existing implementations for automatically assessing FAIR adherence (FAIRness) often suffer from limited usability, inconsistent accuracy, and difficult-to-interpret results, as they require explicit rules to cover for specific FAIR assessment frameworks, which are not easy to generalize.This paper introduces Fair-Way, an open source tool that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate FAIRness assessment.Fair-Way applies a divide-and-conquer approach to decompose the assessment process into fine-grained tasks, as well as to split the metadata into manageable chunks.Evaluation demonstrates that Fair-Way achieves performance comparable to existing tools, while outperforming them in several key metrics.Moreover, Fair-Way generalizes across FAIR assessment indicators without requiring explicitly programmed logic and supports both structured and unstructured metadata in diverse formats.Finally, it enables user-defined, domain-specific tests, which are typically not supported by other systems.Overall, Fair-Way represents a scalable and flexible solution to accelerate FAIR data practices across research domains.

In recent years, data lakes emerged as a way to manage large amounts of heterogeneous data for modern data analytics. One way to prevent data lakes from turning into inoperable data swamps is semantic data management. Such approaches propose the linkage of metadata to knowledge graphs based on the Linked Data principles to provide more meaning and semantics to the data in the lake. Such a semantic layer may be utilized not only for data management but also to tackle the problem of data integration from heterogeneous sources, in order to make data access more expressive and interoperable. In this survey, we review recent approaches with a specific focus on the application within data lake systems and scalability to Big Data. We classify the approaches into (i) basic semantic data management, (ii) semantic modeling approaches for enriching metadata in data lakes, and (iii) methods for ontology-based data access. In each category, we cover the main techniques and their background, and compare latest research. Finally, we point out challenges for future work in this research area, which needs a closer integration of Big Data and Semantic Web technologies.

Data lakes have emerged as a solution for managing vast and diverse datasets for modern data analytics. To prevent them from becoming ungoverned, semantic data management techniques are crucial, which involve connecting metadata with knowledge graphs, following the principles of Linked Data. This semantic layer enables more expressive data management, integration from various sources and enhances data access utilizing the concepts and relations to semantically enrich the data. Some frameworks have been proposed, but requirements like data versioning, linking of datasets, managing machine learning projects, automated semantic modeling and ontology-based data access are not supported in one uniform system. We demonstrate SEDAR, a comprehensive semantic data lake that includes support for data ingestion, storage, processing, and governance with a special focus on semantic data management. The demo will showcase how the system allows for various ingestion scenarios, metadata enrichment, data source linking, profiling, semantic modeling, data integration and processing inside a machine learning life cycle.