National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDi) @ UDE
The German National Research Data Infrastructure association (Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur e.V.; NFDI) is an expertise and infrastructure network funded by the federal and state governments. Members of the association include universities, higher education institutions, ministries, authorities, institutes, museums and other organisations and institutions. Representatives from academia and information infrastructure facilities are organised in independent expert consortia spanning various disciplines and federal states.
The objective of NFDI is to develop solutions for the sustainable, high-quality and systematic storage and analysis of datasets from science and research and make them available, as well as to establish a research data management (RDM) system based on the FAIR principles.
UDE contributes to the conceptual design of NFDI for individual disciplines in various consortia and promotes the establishment of a sustainable data culture as a member of the NFDI e.V. association.
UDE within NFDI e.V.
In April 2021, UDE joined the NFDI association.
UDE underlines the role of universities within NFDI as institutions that (further) educate early career researchers and transfer knowledge within academia and into society. It advocates the comprehensive integration of universities into the infrastructure and expertise developed as part of NFDI.
National research data infrastructure (NFDI) @ UDE
KonsortSWD and Text+ – Prof. Dr. Andreas Blätte
As part of NFDI, KonsortSWD expands the services offered for research involving data in the social, behavioural and educational sciences, as well as in economics and business administration. Researchers and research data centres are to be provided with technical and conceptual support for their management and subsequent use of (new) sensitive and non-sensitive data in accordance with the FAIR principles.
The Text+ consortium focuses on digital collections, lexical resources and editions to make text and language-based research data available for the long term and enable their widespread use in academia.
With his PolMine project (project for corpus-assisted policy research), Prof. Dr. Andreas Blätte from UDE’s Institute of Political Science at the Faculty of Social Sciences is involved in both consortia. He contributes the ‘Linking textual data’ sub-project to KonsortSWD and the digital collection of parliamentary debates of the German Bundestag (GermaParl corpus) to the Text+ consortium.
NFDI4Ing – CRC/TRR 196 MARIE
The NFDI4Ing consortium focuses on creating the necessary infrastructures for the field of engineering. In addition to the further development of process analyses and descriptions, solutions for the publication and citation of research data that apply the FAIR principles in a manner suitable to the discipline are to be identified and formal qualification and further education concepts are to be established. The identification of ‘archetypes’ of engineering – i.e. typical research methods and procedures that help classify the corresponding challenges in research data management – serves as a starting point for this.
The DFG Collaborative Research Centre TRR 196 ‘Mobile Material Characterization and Localization by Electromagnetic Sensing’ (MARIE) established at UDE provides the consortium with metadata for terahertz research and is involved in the Metadaten4Ing working group.
NFDI4Biodiversity – Prof. Dr. Florian Leese
In order to make the particularly heterogeneous data in biodiversity research available in a consistent and standardised way, the NFDI4Biodiversity consortium has set itself the objectives of promoting research data management as an integral part of biodiversity research, providing a basis for FAIR data and jointly implementing infrastructure services for data and research that are sustainable for the long term.
Among others, the European collaborative project DNAqua-Net and its academic director and spokesperson, Prof. Dr. Florian Leese from UDE’s Faculty of Biology/Aquatic Ecosystem Research, contribute to the consortium. The goal of DNAqua-Net is to (further) develop standardised genetic methods for assessing the biodiversity of aquatic ecosystems in cooperation with contributors from 50 countries.
FAIRmat – Prof. Dr. Rossitza Pentcheva
The FAIRmat consortium is concerned with research data management in materials science, condensed matter physics and chemical physics of solids. The objective of the consortium is to establish a decentralised infrastructure by connecting and expanding existing components in order to describe and characterise the heterogeneous data volumes in the field of fundamental research on material properties in physics and chemistry in a standardised and structured way and enable the exchange of data in accordance with the FAIR principles. Prof. Dr. Rossitza Pentcheva from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Duisburg-Essen leads the activity area ‘Community Building and Support’ within the consortium.
Arbeitsgruppe Prof. Dr. Rossitza Pentcheva
Further involvement:
An application for the third round of calls for proposals is being prepared for the NFDIxCS consortium, which is intended to identify and define services for storing complex, domain-specific data objects from across the field of computer science and making them available, thus implementing the FAIR principles comprehensively, especially in the field of research software. At UDE, Prof. Dr. Michael Goedicke from the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration is to lead the consortium.
In the field of nanomaterials, the InnoMatSafety consortium, which is concerned with concepts in the data-intensive research on innovative materials and their effects on human health and the environment, will apply for funding as part of the third funding period. On the part of UDE, Prof. Dr. Matthias Epple will be involved in this consortium.
Another consortium that is being prepared for the third funding period is NFDI4Bioimage, which focuses on topics in microscopy, biophotonic technology and image analysis, and in which UDE is planning to be involved as a community use case.