Sustainability

Deployment in the Cloud

There are several aspects to the way the Semantic Farm web application is deployed listed in this section.

Software

The Semantic Farm source code is licensed under the MIT License and is hosted openly on GitHub at https://github.com/biopragmatics/bioregistry. These are the software and operating system specifications for the currently running instance of the Semantic Farm:

Semantic Farm Version
0.13.14

Hardware

These are the hardware and operating system specifications for the currently running instance of the Semantic Farm:

Python
3.14.2
Platform
Linux-6.12.27-fly-x86_64-with-glibc2.41
Platform Version
#1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Mon Oct 6 17:00:25 UTC 2025
Deployed
2025-12-21 12:27:21.566887

Project Longevity

The Semantic Farm is funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) Open Science Grant 2023-329850 which stipulates unlimited no-cost extensions. We have allocated part of this grant to ensure that the domain registration, hosting, and hardware will be funded in the medium- and long term under a conservative cost estimate of around $100-200/year.

The Semantic Farm implements the Open Code, Open Data, Open Infrastructure (O3) Guidelines as a means to enable and encourage community contribution and maintenance in the medium- and long term. All code is permissively licensed with the MIT License and all data is under the Creative Commons Zero (CCO) license, meaning anyone can reuse the data as they see fit.

Mirroring

The Semantic Farm can be mirrored following these instructions.

Deploying with Custom Content

The Semantic Farm can be deployed using custom content by following these instructions.

Project Governance

Stakeholders in the Semantic Farm have been interested in questions including:

  • Will the service still be running in 10 years?
  • Who makes technical decisions about how the web application?
  • Who makes curation decisions about the underlying registry?
  • Should there be acceptance criteria for new entries, such as a minimum metadata standard or assessment of impact?
  • How will the Semantic Farm avoid the pitfalls of a closed curation process like the one implemented by Identifiers.org?
  • How should inevitable prefix/namespace collisions be handled?

These questions do not have easy answers and apply to most databases, software, and web applications in the life sciences. As first steps towards addressing those, we have written explicit, public, well-defined contribution guidelines, code of conduct, and project governance.

If you would like to be part of this discussion and/or development of these policies, you can try the following:

Evaluation of FAIR Data Principles

Content negotiation was implemented in PR #682 in order to better comply with FAIR-ness evaluations such as th FAIR Enough Evaluation