NFDI @ UFR

Today, research data is often stored in many different places, difficult to find and only available for a limited time. The NFDI aims towards better findability, accessibility and reusability of research data.

Base4NFDI integrates and establishes basic services as common, interoperable solutions. Already existing services are adapted or extended to be usable for researchers from other disciplines. This way, parallel developments are avoided – since many scientific fields have similar requirements for a number of research data management services.

• Homepage: https://base4nfdi.de
• UFR contact(s): Dr. Björn Grüning

Consortium for Research Data on Material and Immaterial Cultural Heritage

Digital data on material and immaterial cultural heritage are an essential part of everyday life, communication and cultural experience. They are not only of great importance for future generations of scholars, but also form the basis of constant transfer processes between researchers, artists, cultural industries and civil society.

The long-term preservation and reliable availability of digital cultural assets in accordance with the FAIR and CARE principles are of fundamental importance for the cultural self-image of individuals, groups and society as a whole. The aim of NFDI4Culture is to establish a demand-oriented infrastructure for research data on tangible and intangible cultural assets within the overall structure of the NFDI. The research landscape covered by NFDI4Culture, ranging from architecture, art and music to theatre, dance, film and media studies, is characterised by great diversity. It includes university institutes, art and music colleges, academies, galleries, libraries, archives, museums and individual researchers. Science-led research data management requires the active participation of all stakeholders. The consortium therefore provides extensive participation opportunities for users from all disciplines involved, as well as for artists and cultural practitioners from various fields of activity and representatives of civil society. It aims to represent the broad spectrum of different actors in the field of cultural heritage.

• Homepage: https://nfdi4culture.de
• UFR contact(s): Jun-Prof. Julia von Ditfurth

Language and text-based research data are of outstanding importance in many disciplines in the humanities. Initially with the data domains Collections, Lexical Resources and Editions, Text+ addresses the requirements of a wide range of research fields that are based on a long research tradition. These data domains are linked to mature methodological paradigms that require distinctive, but also cross-disciplinary data generation, curation, and data management practices.

Text+ is not limited to existing data, but will systematically expand its portfolio in close consultation with the expert communities involved. This also includes tools to support researchers in the FAIR creation, use and provision of data throughout the entire research data life cycle.

The usability of the data and tools combined with the legally compliant use of language and text data, which often affects the rights of third parties, are central tasks of Text +. The diversity of the data adds to the complexity, the data being heterogeneous in terms of language families (extending beyond Europe), modalities of language and writing systems. The + sign indicates that Text+ is open, for example also for language-based resources and tools for speech and for multimodal data. As a distributed infrastructure, Text+ relies on and incorporates a wide range of existing data and tools from the currently more than 30 partners in the consortium.

• Homepage: https://text-plus.org/
• UFR contact(s): Prof. Dr. Christian Mair

National Research Data Infrastructure for Interdisciplinary Energy System Research

The necessary transformation of energy systems towards net zero greenhouse gas emissions provides a plethora of new research challenges. In this context, the digitalisation towards cyber-physical energy systems (CPES) alleviates change, and equally affects technical, social, and societal topics, as well as the mode of research in the CPES research community.

Research efforts towards CPES heavily rely on modelling and (co-)simulation-based approaches. Tracking of models together with all data creates a complex software and data management challenge, which needs to be addressed in each research project. In addition, energy system research is characterized by the fact that there is a strong connection to practice with industry partners on the one hand and a great need to involve society on the other hand. These additional stakeholders further increase the complexity of dealing with data and models in research.

To support researchers with these complex challenges, NFDI4Energy takes existing RDM approaches, among others, developed in other NFDI consortia, and adapts them to the needs of its own research community.

• Homepage: https://nfdi4energy.uol.de
• UFR contact(s): Prof. Dr. Anke Weidlich, Ramiz Qussous, Mirko Schäfer

We support researchers in Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) with FAIR data solutions that enable new discovery.

We envision research data management (RDM) that supports every stage of a project, strengthens collaboration through easier data exchange, and integrates materials data from different techniques, including experiments and simulations.

We invite researchers with all levels of RDM knowledge to engage with an ecosystem of adaptable workflows, services, tools, and guidance that support daily laboratory and simulation work.

• Homepage: https://nfdi-matwerk.de
• UFR contact(s): Chris Eberl

Democratization of plant research made easy and free for everyone!

Plant research uses interdisciplinary approaches to understand the mechanisms of plant physiology, growth and productivity. High-throughput and targeted methods are used to generate large amounts of data from genomics, transcriptomics and other areas.

To utilise this data effectively, research data management (RDM) according to the FAIR principles, data sharing and scientific collaboration are crucial. DataPLANT supports plant research through an open model that provides robust and accessible RDM practices and tools. A central element is the Annotated Research Context (ARC), which integrates relevant research and metadata into FAIR-compliant digital objects. In addition, the PLANTdataHUB cloud platform facilitates data exchange, publication and collaborative data management.

DataPLANT promotes the plant research data community through training activities and the provision of a data management plan wizard. The aim is to achieve broad participation in NFDI, focussing on interoperability and integration of existing datasets. DataPLANT is also working with other NFDI consortia to develop common standards and best practices for data processing and quality control. Automation and community involvement will ensure the sustainability of DataPLANT services and support the creation of high-quality data publications.

• Homepage: https://nfdi4plants.org
• Services:
  • ARCitect - An end-to-end GUI application to manage ARCs for data-driven publications.
  • ARC Data Hub Instances - Implementations of the ARC Data Hub concept by DataPLANT and other communities.
  • DataPLAN - A Data Management Plan (DMP) generator.
  • The Galaxy Instance for Plant Biology - Analyze your data stored in ARCs using the Galaxy Workflow Platform.
• UFR contact(s): Dr. Dirk von Suchodoletz

National research data infrastructure for microscopy and bioimage analysis

NFDI4BIOIMAGE intends to establish and further develop data management for bioimaging and bioimage analysis for researchers in Germany and in coordinated collaboration with international partners.

The consortium is composed of experts in (light) microscopy and image analysis (bioimage informatics). Several co-spokespersons lead microscopy centers or multimodal instrument centers and are networked through the non-profit association German BioImaging – Society for Microscopy and Image Analysis e.V. where they are jointly active for the interests of the microscopy community.
In addition, the co-spokespersons and stakeholders are internationally recognized for their professional contributions in the field of image analysis, microscopy methods, or data management concepts and systems.

With numerous contributions from the scientific community across disciplines, NFDI4BIOIMAGE, as a primarily method-centric consortium, addresses the particular challenges associated with the large volume, high-dimensional image data generated by modern microscopy. Goals include the development of a cloud-compatible FAIR digital object standard for biological imaging, the further development of metadata standards and annotation tools, the linkage between local storage solutions and appropriate microscopy data repositories, as well as the improved reproducibility of image analysis workflows and the dissemination of best practices in the scientific community.

• Homepage: https://nfdi4bioimage.de
• UFR contact(s): Dr. Björn Grüning

Data from PHoton and Neutron Experiments for NFDI

DAPHNE4NFDI (DAta from PHoton and Neutron Experiments) is building an open and FAIR infrastructure for research data management for research with photons at synchrotron light sources and neutrons. This is a diverse field of research, conducted in particular at large-scale research facilities. Photons at synchrotron radiation sources and neutrons allow unique insights into matter and biological, chemical and physical processes.

With these, urgently needed techniques that solve society’s problems in a sustainable way can be developed. Research with photons and neutrons covers a very broad spectrum of scientific disciplines. There are more than 5500 scientists working directly in these fields all over Germany. Currently, data volumes of more than 30 petabytes are generated per year – and the trend is rising. The large volume of data poses a number of challenges: The data is often user-specific, a wide variety of software is used for analysis, and data cannot be easily exchanged. The vision of DAPHNE4NFDI is therefore to make the transparency, FAIRness, and reusability of data generated at photon and neutron facilities available to the broader research community. This goes beyond the individual group performing the measurement. In addition, there is a great need for rapid high-level data analysis or the use of reference spectra. The data should also be systematically stored, their quality verified, and thus they should be reusable. In this way, scientific work is made more efficient and an optimum amount of information and knowledge can be obtained from the data.

• Homepage: https://www.daphne4nfdi.de
• UFR contact(s): Prof. Dr. Oliver Einsle

NFDI Consortium Earth System Sciences

NFDI4Earth is a network of 59 actors, which addresses the digital needs of Earth System Sciences (ESS). Scientists cooperate in international and interdisciplinary networks with the overarching aim to understand the functioning and interactions within the earth system and address the multiple challenges of global change.

NFDI4Earth is a community-driven process providing researchers with FAIR, coherent, and open access to all relevant earth system data, to innovative research data management and data science methods.

Challenges include the consolidation of various discipline-specific approaches, developing common standards and facilitating the interoperability of heterogeneous, distributed research data management services. Moreover, a commonly accepted NFDI4Earth FAIRness and Openness Commitment is key to fostering a cultural change towards FAIR and Open research data management in the ESS community.

• Homepage: https://www.nfdi4earth.de
• Services:
  • deadtrees.earth - An open database for accessing, contributing, analyzing, and visualizing remote sensing-based tree mortality data.
  • 3Dtrees.earth - Most 3D forest data is scattered and unused. We make it visible, connected, and valuable — for science, AI, and sustainability.
  • planttraits.earth - From smartphones to satellites: Uniting crowdsourced biodiversity monitoring and Earth observation to fill the gaps in global plant trait mapping
• UFR contact(s): Prof. Dr. Teja Kattenborn

Particles, Universe, NuClei and Hadrons for the NFDI

PUNCH4NFDI combines expertise in data management in particle physics, astroparticle physics, hadron and nuclear physics and astronomy. The consortium can draw on the experience of its communities, which has grown over decades, especially in the area of scalable solutions for very large data volumes in heterogeneous environments, for many thousands of users and with “open data”. PUNCH4NFDI wants to bundle and further develop the already existing, successful, but often isolated solutions.

Based on a layered model of data management already implemented in parts of the community, the consortium wants to create a FAIR “Science Data Platform” as a biotope for the entire life cycle of digital research products and also make it available to other branches of science. Another issue is the problem of data irreversibility, i.e. the unavoidable reduction of data sets due to the very high data volumes. A particular priority for PUNCH4NFDI is networking and establishing synergies with other consortia from the field of physics and beyond. Other priorities are education and training.

• Homepage: https://www.punch4nfdi.de
• UFR contact(s): Prof. Dr. Markus Schumacher