Serving FAIR Semantic Artefacts: A Review of Semantic Artefact Catalogues

The growing number of ontologies and other semantic artefacts in data-intensive research has made their discovery, evaluation, and reuse a critical challenge. Semantic Artefact Catalogues (SACs) have emerged as key infrastructures to address these needs, yet their landscape seems fragmented and poorly characterised. Questions persist regarding which types of SACs exist (ontology repositories/libraries, vocabulary/terminology services, etc.), which are actively maintained, the domains they serve, and the technologies on which they are based. This paper presents a comprehensive current and historical review of SACs. The study focuses on their technologies, disciplinary scope, and capacity to enable FAIR principles for semantic artefacts. 190 SACs were identified and analysed, across 17 disciplines and relying on 12 “generic” technologies. To assess their FAIR-enabling potential, we defined ten dimensions derived from existing ontology FAIRness assessment frameworks and tools and assessed a subset of 60 SACs accordingly. The findings underscore both the diversity and fragmentation of SACs, while identifying opportunities for greater harmonisation and interoperability through shared, reusable technologies or APIs. A living version of the SAC review dataset is openly available (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.12799861) and can be continuously updated or extended by the community to reflect new catalogues and developments.