In the section, cooperation is practised across all consortia and a functioning internal organisation is created. The technical content is developed by working groups in which representatives of the consortia and other experts contribute their knowledge. The NFDI consortia bring with them a variety of heterogeneous and distributed information infrastructures. A central task of the section is to identify components for common use and to work out proposals on how these can be technically structured and implemented. Interoperability requires in particular agreement on protocols and standards as well as the specification of workflows and interfaces. According to the current understanding, the concrete infrastructure components will comprise numerous elements that can be understood as so-called “basic services”. By this the section means services with which the basic infrastructural supply is guaranteed for potentially all consortia or in which there is a common interest in use in the consortia and for which competing or incompatible solutions are to be avoided. The development of basic services is carried out in coordination and, if possible, division of labour with all sections of the NFDI association. Special challenges arise from the different levels of maturity in infrastructure development in the consortia as well as the interconnections of the consortia with existing or developing infrastructures in the national and international environment. Of central importance are the long-term provision of storage and computing capacities by the partners as well as further requirements for the sustainability of the services to be developed.

Data Integration (DI)

The immense heterogeneity of scientific data and the data combination problems induced by this often prevent the derivation of new knowledge, especially in the context of interdisciplinary projects. The aim of this working group is therefore to develop and provide scalable methods for integrating data and metadata to enable easy data exchange between users and services. In particular, physical and virtual integration methods, methods for schema matching and semantic annotation as well as knowledge graphs will be considered. In addition, an architecture for the integration of scientific data is developed on the basis of concrete user stories and a first reference implementation is provided. Contact: Bernhard Seeger; Andreas Henrich; Thorsten Papenbrock; Dirk Riehle

Data Management Planning (DMP)

The working group aims to coordinate the DMP activities of the NFDI consortia. In addition to the establishment of DMP tools, agreements on their coordinated further development and the harmonisation of DMP templates in terms of content, concepts for the strategic implementation of DMPs in the research workflows, training and advisory services are also being developed. Since DMPs form essential connecting or intermediate pieces of the data management workflow and cover them almost completely in terms of content breadth, we strive for partial cooperation with the other NFDI sections such as training and metadata. Contact: Daniela Hausen; Gerald Jagusch; Jürgen Windeck; Harry Enke

Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (DSAI)

The working group aims to help improve and increase hands-on adoption and practice-orientation of the results of the participating NFDI projects, where possible also by means of showcasing effective solutions, policy-, technical- and practice-based to end user communities. As part of the current activities, the section has  focused on the following two service concepts: (i) FAIRness evaluation: evaluate the FAIRness level of the digital objects with FAIRness metrics, (ii) Online Reproducible Data Analysis: JupyterHub for larger binder-ready FAIR Digital Objects. Contact: Adamantios Koumpis; Arnim Bleier  

Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELN)

The working group includes representatives from different NFDI consortia, with a focus on the natural science disciplines and life sciences. The working group aims to prepare and establish services to support the selection of appropriate ELN software and its implementation in the consortia, their communities and individual groups. The working group will deal with the systematic evaluation of different ELNs and their data structures. Furthermore, a platform for testing different ELN software and similar (embedded) tools will be established in order to offer permanent access to the relevant solutions and to enable a comparative view. Contact: Nicole Jung; Christof Wöll; Felix Bach

Identity and Access Management (IAM)

The working group aims to consolidate processes, policies and architectures in order to facilitate the management of digital identities and federated access to resources within and across the NFDI consortia. For this purpose, it will be necessary to connect and expand existing and emerging IAM systems in a way that researchers from different domains and institutions are able to access the NFDI resources as easily as possible, yet in a secure manner. Interoperability is a central requirement, not only within NFDI but also regarding access to and exchange with external infrastructures like EOSC or the Life Science AAI. Contact: Marius Politze; Wolfgang Pempe

Infrastructure and Data Security (IDS) 

Scientific disciplines deal with the proper management of personal data of human data subjects that fall under the EU General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) or other sensitive data types that require technical and organizational measures to ensure a high degree of information security. This working group “Infrastructure and Data Security” (IDS) in the NFDI Section Common Infrastructures deals with the required technical and organizational measures that need to be implemented in research infrastructure to ensure secure and lawful processing and management of personal and sensitive data. Contact: Petra Ritter

Long-term Archival (LTA)

The working group consists of members of various NFDI consortia covering the humanities, natural science and engineering disciplines and experts from a variety of pertinent infrastructures with strong overall connections to the nestor long-term archiving competence network. The close linkage of NFDI consortia with experienced partners in the field of LTA ensures that a) the relevant technical state-of-the-art is present in the group and b) the knowledge of data producers about contexts of origin and data users interact directly. This composition enables the team to take an overarching view that spans the requirements of the disciplines and consortia, also takes into account interdisciplinary needs, and at the same time brings in the existing know-how in the infrastructure sector. Most solutions addressing LTA draw on the OAIS model (ISO 14721:2012) describing the ingestion, archival proper and dissemination process of documents and data. Contact: Peter Leinen; Thomas Staecker

Multi-Cloud (MC)

The key objective of all NFDI consortia is to systematically register and provide data in a sustainable manner such that it can be openly and unitarily accessed on national and even international level. The foundation for such an overarching common infrastructure is built upon the concept of a federated Multi Cloud architecture that provides unified access by a federated Identity and Access Management (IAM) infrastructure to compute and data storage resources and allows seamless higher level integration of distributed heterogeneous services and data. Contact: Alexander Sczyrba

Persistent Identifiers (PID)

The aim is to develop a common strategy for the implementation and extension of community-based and broadly used PID services that is closely aligned with the needs of NFDI consortia. This will include the necessary technical & organisational measures as well as the training and educational aspects particularly around standardised and complete metadata ensuring compliance with the FAIR principles.

Contacts: Sven Bingert, Stephanie Hagemann-Wilholt

Research Software Engineering (RSE)

The working group networks the NFDI specialist consortia in software-related aspects. It focusses on three areas: Research software, software communities and software infrastructure at NFDI. In an advisory and supportive capacity, the working group operates a central forum and establishes the necessary software ecosystem within NFDI for the professional development of software infrastructure components, which in their entirety represent an integral part of NFDI. In addition, the working group serves as an interface for NFDI to comparable European and international initiatives in order to promote the connectivity of NFDI with other infrastructures.

Contact: Florian Thiery, Bernd Flemisch

Deputy speaker: Dr. Michael Diepenbroek  

(Gesellschaft für Biologische Daten e.V. (GFBio e.V.))