📄️ Introduction
This section documents shared services and technical building blocks enabling FAIR data across NFDI.
📄️ WG 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.
📄️ WG 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.
📄️ WG 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 evaluate the FAIRness level of the digital objects with FAIRness metrics, (ii) Online Reproducible Data Analysis: JupyterHub for larger binder-ready FAIR Digital Objects.
📄️ WG 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.
📄️ WG 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.
📄️ WG 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.
📄️ WG Long-term Access and Preservation (LTA)
The working group has the aim to identify and coordinate procedures and techniques by which data and software as bit streams and reproducible information objects can be preserved and used long term. It is composed of members from various NFDI consortia from humanities, natural and engineering sciences as well as experts from relevant infrastructures, strongly connected to the nestor competence network for long-term archiving. The close coupling of NFDI consortia to experienced partners in the area of long-term archiving ensures that on one hand the relevant state-of-the-art is present in the group and on the other hand the knowledge of data producers about creation contexts and data users can directly interact.
📄️ WG 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.
📄️ WG Overall Architecture (OA)
The NFDI Overall Architecture Working Group aims to develop a shared vision and blueprint for a federated research data infrastructure across NFDI consortia. It addresses the fragmented current landscape by identifying common components and fostering cross-domain integration. The group’s objectives include defining a unifying vision, formulating a collaborative strategy, ensuring scalability and efficiency, engaging stakeholders to align needs and expectations, analyzing consortia-specific dynamics, and promoting inclusive and transparent governance.
📄️ WG 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.
📄️ WG 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.