Nutrition Data Infrastructure for the AI Era: Operationalizing FAIR for Agent-Mediated Research

Geospatial datasets support applications from urban planning to climate modeling, yet consistent assessment of FAIR compliance is difficult. Existing evaluators use different rubrics and evidence sources and may fail on JavaScript-rendered pages or repository-specific identifiers. For 50 datasets from 10 repositories, the standard deviation of normalized scores across available tools averages 15.0 percentage points and reaches 30.3 for one dataset. Because these outputs are not equivalent measurements, we use them to characterize disagreement and failure modes, not comparative accuracy. We present AgentFAIR, a multi-agent framework combining structured metadata extraction with 13 sub-principle-specific LLM evaluators. Each produces a 0-3 maturity score, cited evidence, and recommendations; a critic checks evidence and consistency and can request targeted re-evaluation. Mean Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability scores are 79.7%, 70.4%, 45.3%, and 72.0%. Rank correlations with four baseline tools range from 0.31 to 0.61; the FAIR-enough comparison is not statistically significant. On a 10-dataset repeated-run subset, sub-principle agreement averages 89% (standard deviation: 3 percentage points), versus 71% without the critic. A preliminary 15-dataset expert study yields Fleiss' kappa of 0.71 and 82% alignment with expert consensus. API cost is approximately USD 0.054 per dataset. These results support auditability and feasibility, while the limited benchmark, incomplete ablations, and single-model-family validation constrain claims about accuracy and generalization.

In the era of autonomous agents, machine-actionable data is critical for data-driven workflows. For more than a decade, semantic metadata like schema.org has anchored the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) for machine-actionable data and enabled discovery tools like Google Dataset Search. However, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) capable of navigating the unstructured web raises a fundamental question: Is semantic metadata still necessary for agentic data discovery, or can agents reliably retrieve actionable data directly from the web? We present a comparative analysis of agentic data retrieval across two distinct environments: a Baseline Agent searching billions of open-web documents, and a Semantic Agent leveraging a corpus of 90 million datasets using schema.org. We deploy an "LLM-as-a-judge" evaluation pipeline, mapped directly to the FAIR principles, to assess the semantic relevance, data accessibility, and computational utility of the retrieved data. Our results reveal a clear divergence. The Semantic Agent excels at retrieving actionable data, achieving a 44.9% higher precision for metadata-rich registries and a 46.6% higher precision for pages with machine-readable downloads among its returned results. Conversely, the Baseline Agent frequently suffers "Last-Mile Utility" failures, retrieving prose-heavy pages (20.1% of results) and portal landing pages (8.5%) rather than actual data pages. While the Baseline Agent achieves higher coverage by answering 40% more questions, the Semantic Agent delivers greater accuracy, achieving 65.7% higher overall precision in retrieving FAIR-compliant datasets. We conclude that while unstructured retrieval supports broad exploratory tasks, structured ecosystems remain the indispensable foundation for reliable, execution-oriented autonomous workflows.

Leadership computing facilities steward large-scale scientific datasets that routinely require substantial transformation before serving as AI training data. However, no existing framework fully unifies automated transformation, readiness assessment, provenance tracking, and agent-native deployment. We present REDI, an open-source framework that addresses this gap through a unified five-stage pipeline (ingest, preprocess, transform, structure, and output) with per-stage instrumentation for reproducibility and deployment as an agent-callable skill; companion tool SetGo automates FAIR compliance and catalog publication. Evaluated across climate, proteomics, materials science, and nuclear fusion, REDI transforms all datasets from raw to AI-ready, with outputs validated against domain-expert references, and preliminary results show near-ideal parallel scaling to 100 nodes on Frontier for the climate case. Provenance-instrumented profiling reveals file I/O as the dominant pipeline cost, with format selection a first-order optimization lever. These results establish REDI as a cross-domain platform providing automated data readiness for scientific AI, transforming data preparation bottlenecks into reproducible, reusable community assets.