FOXDEN: FAIR Services for AI-Ready Scientific Datasets

Abstract

Scientific datasets are most compatible with AI workflows when they are described by rich, machine-readable metadata and provenance information, following the FAIR guiding principles. The FAIR Open-Science Extensible Data Exchange Network (FOXDEN) is a set of cyberinfrastructure building blocks developed at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) for annotating raw, reduced, and analyzed datasets with both structured and unstructured metadata and provenance records. It also allows researchers to publish these records with Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to create AI-ready datasets. We describe FOXDEN's architecture and its deployment at CHESS and at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, where it serves as a foundation for future agentic scientific workflows.