3rd Base4NFDI User Conference (UC4B2026)

24 Nov 2026, 10:00 → 25 Nov 2026, 16:00 Europe/Berlin

Reinhard Altenhöner (Staatsbibliothek - PK / Base4NFDI), Raphael Ritz (MPG / MPCDF), Sonja Schimmler, Lukas Weimer (SUB Göttingen)

 

Join us at the 3rd Base4NFDI User Conference (UC4B2026)!

UC4B2026 brings together Base4NFDI, its funded basic services and the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) community for two days of exchange, collaboration and hands-on discussions on shared research data management (RDM) services.

This year's event focuses on:

• Hands-on sessions with incubator presentations and opportunities to showcase service integration within your community
• Strategic discussions on topics such as operating models for basic services

The interactive programme offers participants the opportunity to increase the visibility of their work, exchange ideas with stakeholders from across the NFDI and identify opportunities for broader adoption and integration of services.

Above all, UC4B2026 aims to strengthen collaboration between the basic service teams and the NFDI consortia.

The conference showcases the progress of the Base4NFDI basic services while exploring the development and sustainable operation of research infrastructures from both national and international perspectives. A particular focus is on working directly with the basic service teams to discuss how the technical and organisational roll-out of basic services can be successfully implemented across the NFDI consortia.

About Base4NFDI

Base4NFDI is an initiative of all 26 consortia within the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). It develops, integrates and operates shared basic services for research data management across the NFDI community. Existing services are adapted or extended to support researchers from different disciplines. By November 2026, the Base4NFDI basic services will be available at different stages of maturity.

Fee

Participation is free of charge.

For more information about Base4NFDI, please visit the Base4NFDI website.

Venue

Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Haus Potsdamer Straße
Potsdamer Straße 33
10785 Berlin

(see Venue)

_{Außenansicht Haus Potsdamer Straße © Stabi Berlin, Foto: nilo – Agentur für Fotografie.}

Tuesday 24 November

10:30 → 12:00 Pre-conference workshop: Service Readiness Level

Put Your Service to the Test: A hands-on introduction to the Service Readiness Level Framework
A service is more than its code. Whether it succeeds depends on adoption, training, governance, and the people who keep it running, not only on the technology. Yet these are exactly the things that are hardest to see, to plan for and to communicate to others. Making a service's real maturity visible, technical and non-technical alike, helps teams get a clear picture of where their service currently stands and what kind of support it actually needs to mature.
We will introduce the Service Readiness Level (SRL) framework, a nine-level scale based on evidence criteria rather than external review. It is designed as a self-assessment, allowing teams to evaluate the maturity of their service across technical, organisational, legal and social dimensions. The SRL framework is already being used within Base4NFDI, for example to inform support requests in the newly established Service Support Track (SST), and further application is planned across basic services. It is still work in progress, and this workshop is part of its development and the validation of its current version.
After a short introduction and example, participants will try out the framework on a service of their own, working individually or in small groups, to get a first sense of how the self-assessment works. At the end, we collect feedback to improve and validate the framework together.
The workshop is aimed at service providers and managers who want to self-assess their service, as well as CTOs and infrastructure leads from research-performing organisations. Attendance is not limited to NFDI services, and interested parties from beyond are very welcome. No prior knowledge is needed. Just bring a service you know well and an interest in making its development visible.

Speakers: Sandra Zänkert (ZB MED), Antje Manske (GESIS), Lisa Schwier (Base4NFDI)

12:00 → 13:30 Welcome lunch

13:30 → 15:00 Presentations of incubators; Moderation: Martin Reinhardt

13:30 Incubator Presentation: NFDI-MatWerk Community Membership with Community Management via IAM4NFDI

NFDI-MatWerk will launch the Community Membership platform soon to facilitate and enhance interaction with materials science and engineering researchers and get a better overview over the respective community. This is a platform featuring Single Sign-On via NFDI AAI RegApp. Users thus have access to three different types of services: services such as 'rent an expert', tools connected to RegApp such as Coscine, and the ability to exchange ideas in groups via RegApp Community Management (hub for exchange). The Community Management function of RegApp has not yet been tested in an incubator in this form. We are currently in the application process for the 3rd incubator round.
If the incubator does not take place, we can also present our idea using RegApp and Community Membership as a poster or talk.

Speakers: Ms Anika Fritsch (Fraunhofer IWM; Uni Freiburg), Ms Katharina Maria Elisabeth Grünwald (RWTH Aachen University), Mr Sebastian Slawik (DGM)

Base4NFDI_user_conference_abstrac_NFDI-MatWerkCM.pdf

13:48 Solving Key Research Data Challenges with Base4NFDI: Improving Login, Project Creation, and Metadata Management in Coscine

How can I easily log in to my research data management platform? Is it possible to automatically create a project based on my data management plan? Which metadata terms best match my custom metadata profile to describe my research data? Fortunately, we found the answers to all three user questions of our research data management platform Coscine - thanks to our participation in four Base4NFDI incubators.
The main aim of Coscine is to create a coherent, FAIR workflow for research data management – from the beginning of a research project till its archiving. Since Coscines first broadcast at RWTH Aachen University, the usage has expanded throughout North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany and even beyond. To date, researchers of fifteen universities and two NFDI consortia (NFDI4ING and NFDI-MatWerk) use the platform to store their research data and associated metadata - often in collaboration with project members around the world. As the number of users has increased in recent years, so too have the demands placed on our platform - particularly regarding national interoperability with other services.
In our presentation we will illustrate our participation in incubators and other collaborations with the Base4NFDI Services around Coscine that improved our interoperability with other services - as a showcase for making use of the Base4NFDI service portfolio.

Thanks to the Base4NFDI service IAM4NFDI, Coscine could improve the authentication to the platform by participating in two incubators. The first incubator focused on adding an NFDI login infrastructure to our existing login options using the Community AAI of NFDI4ING. Building on this, the second incubator developed a proof-of-concept for virtual organizations - subgroups within the login infrastructure - that allow Coscine to automatically identify users as members of specific NFDI consortia and assign predefined rights and roles.
Additionally, the incubator with DMP4NFDI resulted in a seamless integration between RDMO and Coscine. Once researchers finalize their data management plans in RDMO, they can export them as JSON files, which Coscine then imports during project creation. This data exchange ensures reliable, consistent metadata across systems while reducing administrative overhead by automating the transfer of project-related information.

Finally, through an incubator with TS4NFDI, the metadata profile editor used in Coscine for metadata management underwent significant improvements. It is based on the AIMS Metadata Profile Service and enables the easy creation of custom metadata profiles. Researchers can use these metadata profiles in Coscine to annotate their research data. A new terminology search widget was added to facilitate the selection of appropriate metadata terms, providing users with detailed term information, the ability to switch between collections, and apply filters. This enhancement offers greater flexibility in selecting community-specific terminology, thereby supporting more precise and consistent metadata annotation by researchers.

Key outcomes of these incubators include improved authentication via NFDI-wide single sign-on, automated role assignment through virtual organizations, seamless data exchange between RDMO and Coscine, and enhanced metadata management through advanced terminology tools. In our presentation, we will also highlight other existing and planned future collaborations with Base4nfdi services, such as PID4NFDI, Jupyter4NFDI, Accounting4NFDI and KG4NFDI.

Speaker: Michèle Robrecht (RWTH Aachen University)

Base4NFDI_user_conference_abstract_incubator_coscine.docx

14:06 TS4MathModDB: When the Owl meets the Wikibase - Keeping two Worlds in Sync

MathModDB, a mathematical knowledge graph developed within the Mathematical Research Data Initiative (MaRDI), exists in two forms: a formally rigorous OWL ontology and a Wikibase-based knowledge graph in the MaRDI portal that enables open, community-driven curation. Without coordination, these two representations risk drifting apart over time. The TS4NFDI incubator project TS4MathModDB addresses this by integrating MathModDB into the TS4NFDI Terminology Service while keeping the MaRDI portal as the master copy, and by developing mechanisms to keep the OWL ontology synchronized with it. Beyond the technical synchronization, this integration enables cross-consortia collaboration. The talk argues that such synchronization work, though often invisible, is essential infrastructure for research knowledge graphs spanning multiple technological worlds.

Speaker: Aurela Shehu (WIAS)

UC4B_TS4MathModDB.pdf

14:24 DMP4PS: Building Shared Data Management Planning Support for the Physical Sciences

Data Management Plans (DMPs) support research teams in making informed decisions about the generation, documentation, storage, sharing, preservation, and reuse of research data. However, generic templates often offer insufficient guidance for integrating these processes into discipline-specific research workflows.

In response to this challenge, FAIRmat introduced the FAIRmat Guide to Writing a Research Data Management Plan in 2023 [1], initially tailored to research in condensed-matter physics and materials science. In order to transform this static guidance into an interactive, and maintainable service, FAIRmat developed DMP4PS: an RDMO-based platform for creating and managing DMPs in the physical sciences. This development was realized through a six-month incubator project with DMP4NFDI, a Base4NFDI Basic Service.

During the incubator project, dedicated test and production environments were established for DMP4PS, with technical hosting provided by the University and State Library Darmstadt (ULB) at TU Darmstadt through DMP4NFDI. Two machine-actionable DMP templates were developed: one aligned with the requirements of DFG individual research grants, and another reflecting Horizon Europe guidelines. These templates incorporate structured questions, discipline-specific guidance, and user-friendly summary views. They support researchers and data stewards in developing and maintaining practical DMPs throughout their projects, while also addressing funder requirements. Additionally, FAIRmat created a dedicated entry page that brings together DMP4PS, practical guidance, supporting resources, and contact options [2].

DMP4PS is designed for extension beyond FAIRmat. Other physical sciences consortia and research communities can adapt existing components, contribute their own templates, and use the shared platform without establishing separate technical infrastructure.

This incubator project demonstrates how collaboration between a disciplinary consortium and a Basic Service can transform community knowledge into reusable infrastructure and provide researchers with practical, sustainable support for data management planning. This presentation will briefly outline the collaboration with DMP4NFDI, demonstrate the DMP4PS platform, and discuss its potential to foster collaborative and interoperable data management practices across research communities and institutions.

Keywords: RDM, DMP, RDMO, DMP4PS, Physical Sciences

References:

[1] Mansour, A. E., et al., FAIRmat Guide to Writing a Research Data Management Plan, Zenodo, 2023. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7936477
[2] FAIRmat, DMP Support. https://www.fairmat-nfdi.eu/fairmat/resources-fairmat/dmp-support/dmp-overview

Speaker: Dr Siamak Nakhaie (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

FAIRmat_DMP4PS_Nakhaie_abstract_Base4NFDI_user_conference.rtf

14:42 Jupyter4Chem - Chemistry Data at your Fingertips

The NFDI4Chem consortium participated in the Jupyter4NFDI incubator process and successfully implemented several Jupyter notebooks to demonstrate how researchers can interact with chemistry data repositories and services from NFDI4Chem through the Jupyter4NFDI infrastructure. The notebooks showcase workflows for data retrieval, conversion, computational analysis, visualisation, and metadata querying by using APIs across different services such as MassBank, the NFDI4Chem Converter Service or RADAR4Chem. In addition, these Jupyter4Chem notebooks will be used as training material for upcoming workshops.

Speaker: Steffen Neumann (Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry)

Base4NFDI_user_conference_abstract_Jupyter4Chem.rtf.docx.rtf

15:00 → 15:30 Coffee break: Posters displayed

15:30 → 16:30 Incubators consultation hour

16:30 → 17:01 Posters: Minute Madness; Moderation: Lukas Weimer

16:30 Data Management Plans as Bridges Between Research Communities and NFDI Services

The DMP4NFDI Basic Service supports NFDI consortia in developing and providing tailored services for data and software management planning and is currently in its integration phase. Through incubator projects with 17 consortia, as well as additional collaborations with non-NFDI service providers, we have supported these communities by providing RDMO hosting, developing templates, creating training materials and workshop concepts, and implementing community-specific plugins and integrations.

Data Management Plans (DMPs) and Software Management Plans (SMPs) are often the entry point for researchers into research data management when starting a new project. During project planning, they support the development of a comprehensive RDM strategy by addressing challenges, such as selecting metadata standards, covering often forgotten aspects, such as responsibilities or archiving, and providing information about existing services and materials that can make the creation and management of FAIR research data easier. For consortia and research institutions, providing DMP and SMP templates to their communities offers the opportunity to support the process and communicate relevant best practices and services when they are needed during the planning process and throughout the project.

RDMO’s flexibility allows the development of custom DMP and SMP templates, community-specific plugins, and integrations that address the diverse needs of NFDI consortia and their communities. This enables consortia to tailor RDMO to their specific disciplines while ensuring alignment with NFDI-wide standards. DMP4NFDI has created and maintains a common template framework that supports machine-actionable DMPs. This allows information about the project and its data management process, as described in the DMP, to be transferred into other services, turning the DMP into a communication hub between services and connecting planning with the actual data management workflows.

In this talk, we will highlight the added value of DMP4NFDI for the NFDI ecosystem, demonstrate how DMPs and SMPs can be connected with other services, and discuss how machine-actionable, interconnected DMPs support consortia and strengthen service integration.

Speaker: Isabel Hohle (Technical University of Darmstadt)

Base4NFDI_UC4B_abstract_Talk.docx

16:31 ReproScore-Any: Turning a Reproducibility Study into a Basic Service

Computational notebooks are routinely deposited alongside publications, but deposition does not necessarily imply executability. In a previous study of biomedical publications indexed in PubMed Central, 15,817 Python notebooks with declared dependencies were rerun automatically: 7.6% completed without error, and only 5.6% reproduced the results originally reported [1]. That result raised two questions we will address in this talk: (1) does it hold outside biomedicine, and (2) can computational reproducibility assessment be offered as a service rather than repeated as a study in every field?
To answer the first, we ported the pipeline to astrophysics, replacing PubMed Central with the NASA ADS literature index. Only one component had to change: the discovery layer, which links publications to their code repositories. Everything after that, cloning the repository, rebuilding the environment, running the notebooks, and classifying the errors, worked unchanged. The field-specific part of computational reproducibility assessment is smaller than we had expected.
We answered the second by building ReproScore-Any: give it a repository URL, and it returns a Reproducibility Score with sub-scores for execution success, data availability, documentation, code quality, and structure [2]. Discovery is now pluggable, so a consortium can supply its own literature source and reuse the rest. The service runs on the NFDI JupyterHub, with two additional developments underway: deployment as a containerised service on Jupyter4NFDI infrastructure and integration into the KGI4NFDI infrastructure.
We will present results from astrophysics and computational biology repositories, including the score distributions and the classes of failure that recur across both fields. We close with the question we would most like to discuss with this audience: whether such a service belongs in the NFDI as an author-facing pre-submission check, a repository-side quality signal, or an instrument for measuring computational reproducibility at scale.
Code, dashboard, and demo are openly available [3].
[1] S. Samuel, D. Mietchen, Computational reproducibility of Jupyter notebooks from biomedical publications (2024) GigaScience 13:giad113, https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/giad113
[2] Samuel, S., Mietchen, D., Kim, J., Ahmed, W. and Gaedke, M., 2026. ReproScore: Separating Readiness from Outcome in Research Software Reproducibility Assessment., TPDL 2026. arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.13275.
[3] Link to repository for testing for reproducibility https://vasundharashaw.github.io/ReproScore-Any/

Speaker: Vasundhara Shaw (FIZ-Karlsruhe)

UC4B2026 - ReproScore-Any.pdf

16:32 From a Service Jungle to a Networked Research Data Practice - How FDLink Builds Bridges Between Researchers and Research Data Infrastructures

In FDLink, six universities, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), have joined forces to bring researchers and (cross-)institutional infrastructures closer together. At its core, the project considers research data management not as an additional obligation, but as a shared responsibility of researchers, universities, and (cross-)regional infrastructures.

Our poster highlights the framework concepts, toolkits, curricula and interlinked counselling and networking concepts developed within FDLink, which are intended to help local institutions in future to introduce researchers to the relevant services in the field of research data management (RDM) and to further develop their skills.

We will also give a brief preview of what the final outcome of this joint project will look like.

Speaker: Sven Paßmann (GNOI)

FDLink_Base4NFDI-UserConference2026_Abstract.docx

16:33 Community-driven access portfolio — about the Benefits of Virtual Organisation Management

The stated goal of the Basic Service Identity and Access Management for NFDI (IAM4NFDI) is to enable researchers to seamlessly access all resources in a secure and unified way with the experience of Single Sign-On. One login to rule them all—right? Far from it!
Access management is an important aspect of IAM4NFDI. First and foremost, it means that only those users that are actually authorised may access a service. IAM4NFDI provides active support for four software solutions, so-called Community Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructures (CAAIs), which facilitate exactly that in a user-friendly way. CAAIs use attributes (descriptive elements of researchers’ digital identities) to provide services with information about users. These allow services to grant or prevent access where necessary.
Up to this point in the story, the focus has been on services—it’s time to shift our perspective and bring virtual organizations (VOs) into the picture. VOs are groups with specific attributes that communities can define and manage themselves, led by a so-called VO manager (a researcher, not IAM staff). The CAAI is the single place to manage VO members and their roles, so that they have appropriate access to several connected services. For example, a VO can consist of an entire consortium, include additional collaborating researchers beyond that, or encompass cross-consortium groups such as NFDI sections. What the members of these VOs have in common is that they wish to access the same services with the same needs. Ultimately, to realize the full potential of VOs, close collaboration between VO managers and service providers and answering of important questions is necessary.
• For the VO managers: How can I create a VO? How can I get resources for my VO?
• And for the service providers: How can I support different VOs? How can I allocate resources to VOs?
This results in a community-led access portfolio.
But first things first: Here is your chance to start with your own VO. This poster isn’t just for passive reading – it’s an invitation to engage! You will find inspiration from possible use cases and expert advice on how you can design your own VO with the support of IAM4NFDI. True to the motto: #CYOVO—create your own VO! Find out what's possible—and what all this has to do with cake.

Speaker: Michèle Robrecht (RWTH Aachen University)

Abstract-Poster-IAM.doc

16:34 Metabase TS4NFDI Incubator

Metabase manages heterogeneous computer science metadata via OWL2 schemas, and enables mappings between them. This talk presents its integration with the TIB terminology services and the Cocoda mapping tool, carried out in a TS4NFDI incubator project.

Speaker: Fabian Huch (GNOI)

NFDI_UC4B2026_Metabase.rtf

16:35 One Service Portfolio, Many Entry Points: How DMP4NFDI Collaborates with NFDI Consortia

To create FAIR research data, researchers need to consider their workflows for data creation and documentation before beginning data collection. This planning step helps ensure that datasets and their associated metadata are well defined at the end of a project. DMP4NFDI is the Basic Service that supports NFDI consortia in the development and provision of data and software management planning services. Representing different communities, the consortia have varying requirements, services, and priorities for research data management. DMP4NFDI addresses this diversity by offering a flexible service portfolio that adapts to the specific needs of each consortium.

The service portfolio comprises four core areas: RDMO hosting, RDMO integration with other tools and services, DMP and SMP template development, and training & outreach activities. Rather than following a fixed workflow, collaborations begin at different entry points depending on the consortium's starting situation. For example, many consortia begin without an existing DMP or SMP template, requiring a joint process of identifying community requirements and designing a new, domain-specific template. Others have already developed a template, but need support in transferring it into an RDMO catalog. Similarly, support for RDMO ranges from providing hosted clients to integrating DMP or SMP workflows into existing research infrastructures. Training and outreach activities complement these technical services by equipping NFDI consortia to promote the adoption of DMPs, SMPs, and RDMO within their communities.

This poster illustrates the interconnection of the four service areas and how NFDI consortia can select different collaboration pathways based on their requirements. Through selected examples, it demonstrates that DMP4NFDI acts as a collaborative partner rather than a linear service provider, supporting consortia at their respective stages while ensuring cross-consortial interoperability. The result is a dual benefit: communities receive services tailored to their domain-specific needs, while the resulting DMP and SMP solutions remain interoperable across the NFDI.

Speaker: Marisabel Gonzalez Ocanto (ZB MED – Information Centre for Life Sciences)

Base4NFDI_UC4B_abstract_poster.docx

16:36 PID4NFDI: A Service Portfolio for Persistent Identifiers in NFDI and the Coordination Challenge Ahead

PID4NFDI is the basic service for persistent identifiers (PIDs) within Base4NFDI. The goal of PID4NFDI is to standardize PID usage across the NFDI consortia, strengthen PID governance, and promote interoperability between PID systems and metadata schemas so that identifiers for data, instruments, and other research resources function reliably and consistently throughout NFDI, rather than just within individual consortia.

Speaker: Torsten Kahlert (TIB Hannover)

PID4NFDI_ A Service Portfolio for Persistent Identifiers in NFDI and the Coordination Challenge Ahead.pdf

16:37 RADAR as a Blueprint: A Repository Solution for Multiple Research Communities Integrating Base4NFDI Services

RADAR is a generic research data repository developed and operated by FIZ Karlsruhe. Through many years of productive operation, it has reached the highest technology readiness level (TRL 9), providing trustworthy publication, long-term preservation, and FAIR sharing of research data. Its established core functionalities - including DOI registration, role-based collaborative workflows, embargo and review options, standardised interfaces, and long-term bitstream preservation - provide a reliable foundation for community-specific research data services. This foundation can be extended through configurable repository components and the integration of Base4NFDI services.

Designed as adaptable repository software and an operational platform, RADAR can be tailored to the requirements of different research communities. This approach is already realised through RADAR4Chem, RADAR4Culture, RADAR4Memory and RADAR4ING, demonstrating its applicability across different research domains. RADAR4ING additionally illustrates RADAR's flexibility with respect to deployment models. As a local repository instance, it is operated on community infrastructure while being technically maintained by FIZ Karlsruhe.

Our poster illustrates how these community-specific repository services are realised through modular repository components and the integration of Base4NFDI services. Examples include:

• Community-specific metadata: Support for configurable metadata schemas (e. g. XSD or JSON), enabling discipline-specific metadata models while preserving interoperability with generic repository services.
• Research tool integration: Standardised REST APIs enable interoperability with community research tools, for example by connecting the Chemotion Electronic Laboratory Notebook with RADAR4Chem.
• TS4NFDI: Integration of terminology services through a completed Base4NFDI incubator project, providing ontology-driven metadata annotation, discipline-specific terminology collections, type-ahead support, enriched dataset landing pages and improved semantic interoperability.
• DMP4NFDI: Connecting discipline-specific RDMO services (e. g. RDMO4Chem and RDMO4Culture) with RADAR via REST APIs and XML-based metadata exchange through an ongoing Base4NFDI incubator project.
• IAM4NFDI: Identity and Access Management integration via the RegApp system, supporting single sign-on for RADAR4ING and RADAR4Chem, followed by collaborative role and rights management for virtual organisations.
• KGI4NFDI: Registration of the RADAR Knowledge Graph, making its metadata accessible through the KGI Registry and a public SPARQL endpoint.
• Jupyter4NFDI: Participation in an ongoing Base4NFDI incubator project, demonstrating the interoperability of RADAR4Chem with Jupyter notebooks through its REST API and public SPARQL endpoint to support data discovery, retrieval and reuse.
• Accounting4NFDI: Evaluation of potential integration scenarios.

The implementation experience gained across these community-specific services demonstrates the adaptability and flexibility of the RADAR repository software and platform as an established, high-TRL solution for multiple research communities. It provides a blueprint for further NFDI consortia and research communities seeking to set up their own repository services.

By building on RADAR's mature software, proven operational model, and modular integration of Base4NFDI services, communities can focus on their domain-specific requirements instead of developing repository infrastructures from scratch. As a robust, resilient, and operationally proven platform, RADAR is well positioned to contribute to future federated research data infrastructures within the NFDI and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

Keywords: Research Data Repository, Base4NFDI, FAIR Data, Repository Interoperability, Research Data Infrastructure

Speaker: Kerstin Soltau (GNOI)

UC4B_2026_RADAR_As_A_Blueprint.rtf

16:38 Operationalizing identifier interoperability across the NFDI with the Semantic Farm

A key challenge in achieving the interoperability facet of the FAIR data principles is the consistent identification of researchers, chemicals, paintings, and other entities relevant for NFDI. Often, this means choosing the correct standard uniform resource identifier (URI) or compact URI (CURIE) for an entity from an ontology, controlled vocabulary, PID service, or database.

This presents a challenge when multiple CURIEs or URIs can be constructed for the same entity, which is compounded by the independent evolution of tools and services relevant for different NFDI consortia. For example, the entry for water in the Chemical Entities of Biomedical Interest (ChEBI) can be identified by either the URIs https://www.ebi.ac.uk/chebi/CHEBI:15377 or http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/CHEBI_15377 or by the CURIEs chebi:15377, CHEBI:15377, or CHEBIID:15377. An organization-wide policy is required to determine and communicate which is correct.

The NFDI has not yet adopted an actionable, organization-wide policy for standardizing CURIEs and URIs. We present the Semantic Farm (previously called The Bioregistry) on behalf of the Section Metadata Working Group for Ontology Harmonization and Mappings as a pre-existing, mature solution for the standardization of CURIEs and URIs. It acts as a centralized index of metadata for resources that mint identifiers that can be readily adopted on the NFDI-level and beyond.

Importantly, the Semantic Farm is a foundational service that can directly support complementary base services (PID4NFDI, TS4NFDI, and KGI4NFDI), sections, their respective working groups, and researchers in NFDI consortia towards improving interoperability. We highlight several existing applications of the Semantic Farm within NFDI:

1. TS4NFDI uses both the flagship instance of the Ontology Lookup Service (hosted by the European Bioinformatics Institute) and the TIB Terminology Service instance, which both use the Semantic Farm for URI compression, CURIE expansion, and generation of web links for database cross-references.
2. Section Metadata Working Group for Ontology Harmonization and Mapping uses the Semantic Farm capture ontology lists used by each consortium (https://semantic.farm/nfdi).
3. The Semantic Farm supports the construction of knowledge graphs with standardized URIs such as in Section EduTrain's DALIA platform for open educational resources and Section International Engagement Working Group for Landscaping and Outreach's bibliometric knowledge graph. Standardization facilitates the integration of external data from ORCiD, ROR, CORDIS, and Wikidata.
4. The Semantic Farm's codebase is used by the LinkML runtime, which has growing adoption across consortia such as NFDI4Chem, NFDI4Cat, and GHGA. It can be further used to standardize the prefix maps in LinkML schemas.
5. The Semantic Farm supports consortia like NFDI4Chem that must standardize and ultimately harmonize a variety of ontology, database, and structural identifiers like InChI.

Further information on the Semantic Farm's KPIs can be found here. We aspire to submit Semantic Farm to Base4NFDI Service Support Track and to support its integration in more NFDI services and usage in data resources.

Speaker: Dr Charles Tapley Hoyt (RWTH Aachen University)

16:39 Support4RDM – Connecting RDM Helpdesks beyond Domains

In this contribution, we show how Germany has more than 200 research data management (RDM) helpdesks operating largely in isolation, creating a decentralization problem. Since many researcher's questions are multi-dimensional, and not location- or domain-specific, single helpdesks often cannot provide the needed expertise. Support4RDM addresses this with concrete visions to create a socio-technical infrastructure: workflow development, ticketing system, a helpdesk catalogue, and a chatbot. The initiative has broad and active community support and will add a missing puzzle piece for NFDI and RDM in Germany.

Speaker: Marcus Schmidt (ZALF e.V / FAIRagro)

Base4NFDI_user_conference_abstract_support4rdm.rtf

16:40 The Contribution of the NFDI Sections to NFDI’s Vision

In our poster, we will illustrate with selected examples how cross-consortia collaboration within the sections contributes to NFDI’s vision. We will address various relevant processes and areas of work, such as the process for developing and adopting NFDI standards or the support of the EOSC Node Germany. The goal of the poster is to provide conference attendees with more details about the crucial work that is being carried out in the sections and how they can take part. To this end, we will inform on points of contact and opportunities for participation in the working groups of the sections.

Speaker: Lukas Jansen (Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI) e.V.)

UC4B-2026-abstract-The Contribution of the NFDI Sections to NFDI’s Vision.pdf

16:41 From Basic Service to Community Practice: Integrating Base4NFDI Services in Text+

Text+ provides a domain-specific infrastructure for language- and text-based research data within the NFDI, making heterogeneous resources such as collections, lexical resources, and editions discoverable through the Text+ Data Space. The integration of Base4NFDI basic services is understood not as a technical add-on, but as a way to strengthen this data space, improve usability, and support sustainable research workflows. Central to this process are incubators, which allow generic services to be tested, adapted, and aligned with community-specific requirements. Examples include IAM4NFDI for object-level authorization in repository contexts, DMP4NFDI for community-specific data management planning in RDMO, and Jupyter4NFDI for reproducible and interactive computational workflows. Through workshops, prototypes, surveys, and outreach formats, Text+ creates feedback loops between researchers, infrastructure providers, and NFDI-wide service development. Overall, Text+ demonstrates how basic services become effective when embedded in domain expertise and real research needs.

Speakers: Stefan Buddenbohm (SUB Göttingen), Lukas Weimer (SUB Göttingen)

From-Basic-Service-to-Community-Practice--Integrating-Base4NFDI-Services-in-Text+.rtf

16:42 Towards a Data Mesh for Research Data Management: Insights from an Expert Interview Series in the Engineering Sciences

Abstract of the abstract
Engineering sciences face challenges in their Research Data Management (RDM) regarding heterogeneity of data and formats, findability of decentralised data, comprehensiveness, and interoperability.
The sociotechnical Data Mesh approach from industrial data management appears promising to address these challenges in RDM. Relevance and applicability are investigated in a series of 40 semi-structured expert interviews. As a result, the design of the four Data Mesh principles (domain ownership, data products, self-serve platform, federated data governance) for RDM is presented. A quantitative assessment supplements the qualitative answers.
The results as a whole or individual aspects may be transferable to other disciplines as well as for Base Services, where technical and governance interoperability is required.

Categories
- How basic services solved disciplinary or consortia challenge
- How basic services encouraged data sharing across communities

Speaker: Mario Moser (Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering (WZL) of RWTH Aachen University)

Base4NFDI_UC2026_DataMeshInterviews_Moser.rtf

16:43 ing.grid: Rethinking Peer Review for FAIR Data Management in Engineering

ing.grid is a scholarly-led, Diamond Open Access journal for FAIR data management in the engineering sciences, founded during the first funding period of NFDI4ING. This poster introduces the journal to the NFDI community and shows how it complements Base4NFDI's shared basic services by routing datasets, software, and governance work into the citable scholarly record. Its distinctive open peer review proces,s where preprints, reviewer and community comments, and the final DOI-published version are openly linked, offers a working model of transparency and community participation relevant to anyone designing sustainable, community-driven services.

Speaker: Agnes Kleinhans (TU Darmstadt)

Base4NFDI_ing.grid_Kleinhans.docx

16:44 Exploring NOMAD Oasis as a Cross-Consortia Research Data Management Service for NFDI

See attached template as requested

Speaker: Joseph Francis Rudzinski (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Base4NFDI_user_conference_abstract_FAIRmat-Rudzinski.docx.rtf

16:45 DataHUB: A Controlled FAIRification Infrastructure Layer for Collaborative Research Data Management

FAIR research data originate where research is performed, in laboratories, computational workflows, Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs), and collaborative research environments. These environments are designed to support scientific work rather than the publication of reusable research assets. Existing FAIR ecosystems primarily focus on trusted repositories as the entry point for FAIR data, leaving a critical architectural gap between research environments and long term publication infrastructures.

We argue that this missing infrastructure layer is essential because FAIRification is a continuous process rather than a single publication step. Metadata, semantic annotations, provenance information, and relationships between research artefacts evolve throughout a project's lifetime as scientific understanding improves, collaborators contribute additional knowledge, and community standards mature. Freezing metadata together with research data at publication time therefore conflicts with the evolutionary nature of scientific research.
We propose DataHUB, a controlled FAIRification infrastructure that fills this gap combining a Git like collaborative workspace coupled with a publication registry. Within the workspace, researchers collaboratively manage their data together with metadata under version control, enabling continuous FAIRification throughout the research lifecycle. Data, metadata, provenance, and semantic annotations evolve together while remaining fully traceable and reproducible.

The central concept of DataHUB is the separation between the research object and its FAIR representation. Instead of publishing datasets directly, DataHUB publishes a FAIR Research Manifest, an ARC RO Crate inspired, machine actionable representation of the research object. The FAIR Research Manifest contains persistent identifiers, rich metadata, provenance, semantic descriptions, and resolvable references to the associated research artefacts. The published manifest therefore becomes the stable, citable representation of the research object, while the underlying data remain independent of a particular storage location.

This architecture establishes a simple but powerful model consisting of Research Object, FAIR Research Manifest, Repository. Because the FAIR Research Manifest is independent of the physical storage location, datasets can subsequently be transferred to discipline specific repositories, institutional repositories, or other storage infrastructures without modifying the published manifest. Equally important, the same approach supports research communities for which no trusted repository yet exists, for example because a method is newly emerging or because a dedicated repository has not yet been established.

By separating collaborative FAIRification from long term archival storage, DataHUB establishes FAIRification as a controlled, versioned, and collaborative process rather than a one time publication event. The proposed architecture complements existing repository ecosystems, enables continuous metadata evolution, and provides the missing infrastructure layer between research environments and trusted repositories while remaining flexible enough to support future repositories and emerging scientific communities.

The proposed infrastructure is based on a service-oriented model on the PaaS layer of the NFDI Overall Architecture where researchers interact with the consortium’s service layer rather than directly with the underlying technical providers (e.g., storage). This establishes a clear B2B relationship between the consortium and the technical providers. Evolving from our initial CoRDI recommendations to use a modified GitLab and the subsequent opening of the ARChub DataPLANT workspace, the resulting DataHUB integrates seamlessly into the NFDI overall architecture. As a rather basic service it bridges the gap between generic hardware resources and community-specific services.

Speaker: Dirk von Suchodoletz (University of Freiburg, Computer Center)

Base4NFDI_FAIR-Storage-Infra.odt

16:46 WG – Multi Cloud (MC4NFDI)

WG – Multi Cloud (MC4NFDI)
Authors:
Kilian Schwarz, Frank Förster, Jens Krüger, Sebastian Jünemann, Harry Enke, Alexander Sczyrba and Philipp Wieder
Lead presenter
kilian.schwarz@desy.de, DESY
frank.foerster@computational.bio.uni-giessen.de, Justus Liebig University Giessen
jens.krueger@uni-tuebingen.de, University of Tübingen
s.juenemann@fz-juelich.de, Research Centre Jülich
henke@aip.de, Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam
a.sczyrba@fz-juelich.de, Research Centre Jülich
philipp.wieder@gwdg.de, GWDG Göttingen

Abstract (for poster):
MC4NFDI aims to establish a federated multicloud interconnecting compute and storage resources across different consortia and infrastructure providers, enabling seamless access, efficient use, and cross-domain collaboration. It thereby builds the foundation for cross-platform resource integration and contributes to the development of OneNFDI as the national EOSC node.
The overarching goal of MC4NFDI is to demonstrate the viability of building up cloud-based interoperability within the heterogeneous landscape of NFDI infrastructures. The basis for interconnecting cloud infrastructures lies within the mutual authentication of users. For this purpose, it is anticipated to facilitate the connection to the different domains based on IAM4NFDI. Once authentication and authorisation are handled, the actual deployment of resources, e.g., distinct virtual machines or submission to compute queues, represents the core challenge for this project. The initial plan is to seamlessly integrate infrastructure resources from PUNCH4NFDI, the de.NBI Cloud, and NHR centres. This is accompanied by storage resources from the DFG storage funding call. As research data management is the natural focus for Base4NFDI projects, one of the next tasks is the transfer, staging and replication of data through the heterogeneous infrastructures. The implementation of these tasks will make a core set of procedures and API requirements available. The primary goal is to develop a proof-of-concept combining the cloud resources of the participating NFDI consortia into an initial multicloud, together with a series of selected use cases to serve as demonstrators.
Keywords: NFDI; Cloud; Infrastructure; Federation; Interoperability

Speaker: Dr Kilian Schwarz (DESY)

WG – Multi Cloud (MC4NFDI).rtf

16:47 TRIQ: A Generic Framework for Knowledge Graph–Based Metadata Management

Abstract:
Implementation of FAIR principles based on a knowledge graph (KG) is an attractive approach that is being pursued by many NFDI consortia, as KGs can naturally represent entities, semantic relationships and provenance. However, practical implementations face several technical and organizational challenges that, if not carefully addressed, can hinder a wide adoption of this methodology.
The main challenges include:
• Designing an ontology that accurately models the scientific domain while remaining reusable, extensible, and interoperable.
• Collecting complete, consistent and semantically rich metadata satisfying ontology constraints and mandatory metadata requirements
• Minimizing manual metadata entry while maintaining high metadata quality.
• Integrating heterogeneous data sources
• Ensuring the consistent assignment, resolution, and linkage of persistent identifiers
• Providing intuitive, user-friendly interfaces for metadata representation, navigation, and editing.
• Supporting metadata validation and quality assurance throughout the metadata lifecycle.

Among these challenges, the generation of RDF data by end users remains one of the biggest hurdle, as it typically requires knowledge of semantic technologies and ontology structures. Another major challenge is the highly variable context of research metadata. Depending on the type of research object, experiment, workflow, or scientific discipline, both the number and the semantics of mandatory metadata fields may change considerably. Consequently, metadata acquisition systems must be sufficiently flexible to adapt dynamically to different metadata contexts while still ensuring semantic consistency and FAIR compliance.
To systematically address these challenges, we have developed the TRIQ,[1] a web-based platform for the interactive creation, validation, browsing, and management of FAIR research metadata. At its core is the TRIQ Core Java module, built on the Apache Jena semantic web library.[2,3] A key feature of TRIQ is its decision tree–based guidance for metadata creation, editing, assignment, and semantic linking. Rather than requiring users to manually identify all relevant metadata fields, the system dynamically derives them by reasoning over the metadata already provided together with formal ontology constraints, such as OWL restriction classes or SHACL shape definitions. Consequently, only metadata fields that are valid and required in the current semantic context are presented to the user.

In our presentation,we also describe the key principles underlying the ontology design and the program architecture of the TRIQ Core Java module. In particular, we demonstrate how defined OWL classes play a central role in enabling ontology-driven, decision tree–based guidance for metadata acquisition.

Keywords: NFDI4Cat, knowledge graph, ontology, metadata

[1]. T. Petrenko et al., Zenodo, 2025. doi: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14389435
[2]. McBride, B. IEEE Internet Computing, 6(6), 55–59, 2002.
[3]. Apache Jena, https://jena.apache.org/

Speaker: Taras Petrenko (ZSUV)

Base4NFDI_Petrenko_1.docx

16:48 On the evolution of Data Availability Statements over the first FAIR decade

A decade has passed since the publication of the FAIR Principles, and evaluating how data-sharing practices have evolved in scholarly publishing is informative for shaping sustainable Research Data Management (RDM) infrastructures. Within the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and its Basic Services, understanding where policy mandates succeed or fall short is essential to avoid redundant developments and build targeted, machine-actionable services. However, large-scale empirical evidence on whether research outputs are really becoming FAIRer or merely superficially complying with relevant mandates remains sparse.

To address this gap, we developed an automated, reproducible eight-stage ingestion and analytical pipeline in Python to conduct a large-scale longitudinal corpus study of over 5.7 million biomedical and life-science articles from the PubMed Central Open Access Subset (PMC-OA), published between 2011 and 2025. The pipeline extracts and normalizes Data Availability Statements (DAS), ethics disclosures, repository URLs, accession numbers, and supplementary file links from JATS XML structures. Using rule-based text classification, persistent identifier parsing, automated F-UJI FAIR assessments, and JATS for Reuse markup compliance checks, we evaluated articles against a standardized proxy FAIR score. Temporal trends before and after 2016 were analyzed using segmented linear regression and interrupted time-series modeling, with stratification by discipline, publishing model, collaboration type, and author demographics.

Our analysis reveals a complex shift in data-sharing behaviors. An adoption versus quality paradox emerges: while explicit DAS adoption surged dramatically from under 3% in 2012 to over 65% in 2024, this growth was matched by a parallel surge in the "available on request" anti-pattern, which grew from near 0% to over 18%. This indicates that mandates alone do not guarantee machine-actionable reusability. Furthermore, substantial disciplinary disparities persist. Structural biology, genomics, and bioinformatics consistently achieved the highest FAIR scores, driven by mature domain-specific repositories like NCBI GEO, GenBank, and PDB, whereas clinical research and public health usually scored considerably lower. Regarding publishing models, articles in Gold Open Access journals generally outperformed subscription titles, and while high-tier repository links grew steadily, generic or non-standardized links still constitute a substantial proportion of shared URLs. Finally, international collaborations scored higher than domestic ones, and a persistent gender gap emerged, with female first-authored papers showing significantly less post-2016 FAIR score improvement.

These empirical trends provide actionable insights for Base4NFDI and cross-cutting RDM needs. The prevalence of non-machine-actionable statements underscores the necessity of linking structured DAS generators directly into DMP4NFDI workflows and Jupyter environments. The persistent use of generic URLs highlights the urgency of PID and terminology harmonization via PID4NFDI and TS4NFDI. Moreover, observed domain gaps show where targeted onboarding is required, while automated compliance layers like F-UJI and JATS4R demonstrate how continuous FAIR monitoring can be integrated into national basic services.

Speakers: Sheeba Samuel (GNOI), Daniel Mietchen (FIZ Karlsruhe & NFDI/MaRDI)

On the evolution of Data Availability Statements over the first FAIR decade.docx.pdf

16:49 Freshwater Biodiversity Data Publication as a Base4NFDI User Story: An IGB Perspective

Freshwater biodiversity research produces diverse outputs, including spatial layers, maps, metadata,
biodiversity observations, project documentation and applied knowledge resources. Even where
repositories and portals are available, these outputs are often distributed across separate systems and
prepared for different audiences. This creates a practical research data management (RDM) challenge
relevant to Base4NFDI: how can freshwater biodiversity outputs be published in FAIR ways, linked
across services and made reusable for scientific, policy and planning communities?
This poster presents a user story from the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries
(IGB). The workflow brings together complementary publication pathways: IGB GeoNode for geospatial
data and map-based outputs, FRED as IGB’s institutional research data repository, the Freshwater
Information Platform (FIP), based on the OPPLA information hub system, and FIPbio as the renewed
Freshwater Biodiversity Data Portal of FIP. FIPbio adds a freshwater-specific perspective by addressing
occurrence records, eDNA observations, remote sensing data and abiotic measurements, together with
metadata needs such as ecosystem and waterbody type, habitat characteristics, sampling methods,
life-cycle stages and hydrographic spatial context.
Rather than presenting a finished service, the contribution uses an applied IGB workflow to show where
practical guidance and basic services can support smaller research teams. Key needs include choosing
suitable publication pathways, documenting spatial ecological data, assigning licences, harmonising
metadata, using controlled vocabularies, linking repository records with geospatial layers and
translating project outputs into reusable knowledge resources.
The poster therefore contributes a freshwater biodiversity perspective to discussions on Base4NFDI,
community integration, repository interoperability and cross-cutting service needs for FAIR ecological
data.

Speaker: Mr Emil Friedrich (TU Berlin / IGB)

UC4B2026_Abstract_IGB_Base4NFDI_UserStory.pdf

16:50 FAIR4ever – Development of a sustainable infrastructure for the long-term preservation of research data

Abstract
The idea of data as a common good and the FAIR, CARE and TRUST principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016; Carroll et al. 2020; Lin et al. 2020) form the fundamental framework for the NFDI’s efforts to foster research data management and community-driven, interoperable and sustainable data infrastructures with the aim of a permanent digital knowledge repository.
Accordingly, achieving this goal depends crucially on long-term preservation (LTP) and respective solutions (cf. RfII 2016; Wissenschaftsrat 2025) that ensure the data’s integrity, accessibility and (re)usability despite a wide range of risks (organisational, administrative, or financial constraints, human error, storage media failure, hard-/software obsolescence) and across technological changes (Markus et al. 2024/2025c). LTP is therefore not merely about storing bitstreams, but about functionally ensuring enduring accessibility, authenticity and meaningful interpretation (content preservation). This requires coordination that extends beyond individual fields of expertise: Despite differences in data types, formats, and workflows, the various scientific disciplines face common challenges when it comes to long-term data preservation (Markus et al. 2025a).
This is where the newly launched project FAIR4ever enters the stage. Within the NFDI, numerous domain-specific infrastructures with significant potential for interoperability already exist (Markus et al. 2024). Integrating professional LTP into these represents a prerequisite for guaranteeing permanent availability and reusability of research data in regard of a common research platform (Research Data Commons), too (Markus et al. 2025b). Therefore, the FAIR4ever project aims to establish a consulting service supporting and empowering consortia and cross-disciplinary initiatives within the NFDI and beyond to integrate LTP into their RDM-workflows, evaluate the preservation status of their domain-specific data, and build or expand appropriate preservation solutions in order to meet their needs regarding long-term content preservation.
To reach this goal, the project focuses on four interrelated areas:
• establishing a central consulting service for consortia, cross-cutting initiatives of the NFDI Basic Services, Specialised Information Services (FIDs) and beyond
• documenting best practices, standards, examples, and recommendations while building a knowledge base
• conducting needs assessments (challenges, analysis of problem and requirement) through quantitative surveys and more in-depth structured interviews, combined with a detailed landscape analysis
• networking with NFDI consortia, additional stakeholders like Specialised Information Services (FIDs), state, national, and international initiatives like EOSC EDEN/FIDELIS
This comprehensive assessment of current LTP practices identifies discipline-specific requirements and highlights critical knowledge gaps regarding technical capabilities, legal frameworks, data formats, and compliance obligations. It thus provides a systematic understanding of the current state of LTP of digital research data within the NFDI. On this basis, the FAIR4ever project can support the consortia with customized strategies for implementing digital preservation, which will ideally lead to certification as a trustworthy repository.
Above all, however, FAIR4ever invites representatives of the consortia, base service teams and institutional stakeholders to get in touch with us and share your views on the research data in need of preservation – so that we can tailor our consulting services to your specific needs. Participating in UC4B2026 would represent an ideal opportunity to engage the NFDI community during the initial project phase.

Keywords: FAIR4ever, long-term preservation, digital preservation, research data, TRUST principles

Sources and Bibliography
Carroll et al. 2020
Carroll, S. R., Garba, I., Figueroa-Rodríguez, O. L., Holbrook, J., Lovett, R. , Materechera, S., Parsons, M., Raseroka, K., Rodriguez-Lonebear, D., Rowe, R., Sara, R., Walker, J. D., Anderson, J. and Hudson, M. (2020). The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. Data Science Journal, 19: 43, pp. 1–12. https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-043

EOSC EDEN. Enhancing Digital preservation strategies at European and National level. https://eosc.eu/horizon-europe-projects/eosc-eden [accessed: 14.07.2026]

EOSC FIDELIS: Establishing A European Network of Trustworthy Digital Repositories. https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101188078 [accessed: 14.07.2026]

Lin et al. 2020
Lin, D., Crabtree, J., Dillo, I. et al. The TRUST Principles for digital repositories. Sci Data 7, 144 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-0486-7

Markus et al. 2024
Markus, K., Naumann, K., Schmalzl, M., Watson, J., & Triebel, D. (2024). Long-term Archiving in the NFDI. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11109480

Markus et al. 2025a
Markus, K., Leinen, P., Naumann, K.& Valena, P. (2025). Long Term Data Issues: Workshop about Preservation, Archiving and Access in the NFDI. Zenodo. Long Term Data Issues: Workshop about Preservation, Archiving and Access in the NFDI, online. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15106332

Markus et al. 2025b
Markus, K., Stäcker, T., Pohlkamp, S.& Steinke, T. (2025, August 4). Digital preservation and archiving in the NFDI - Between established standards, missing awareness and approaches to open questions. 2nd Conference on Research Data Infrastructure (CoRDI), Aachen, Germany. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16735966

Markus et al. 2025c
Markus, K., Stäcker, T., Pohlkamp, S.& Steinke, T. (2025). Poster: Digital preservation and archiving in the NFDI - Between established standards, varying levels of awareness and approaches to open questions [Graphic]. Zenodo. 2nd Conference on Research Data Infrastructure (CoRDI), Aachen, Germany. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17054247

RfII 2016
Rat für Informationsinfrastrukturen (2016). Leistung aus Vielfalt. Empfehlungen zu Strukturen, Prozessen und Finanzierung des Forschungsdatenmanagements in Deutschland; Göttingen. urn:nbn:de:101:1-2024091608

Wilkinson et al. 2016
Wilkinson, M., Dumontier, M., Aalbersberg, I. et al. The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Sci Data 3, 160018 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18

Wissenschaftsrat 2025
Wissenschaftsrat (2025): Strukturevaluation der Nationalen Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI); Köln. https://doi.org/10.57674/wcdc-6d36

Speakers: Catie Keßler, Claudia Mächler

Base4NFDI_user_conference_abstract_template_FAIR4ever-20260722.rtf

16:51 User Perspectives on Research Data Infrastructures: Results of the DZHW Science Survey 2026

How do researchers across fields in Germany perceive potential benefits of the NFDI and its basic services? What kinds of support do researchers need when using research data infrastructures? And how do they get relevant information? To answer these questions, we use the DZHW Science Survey 2026 to investigate user perspectives on research data infrastructures, the NFDI and its basic services.

As part of the impact assessment of Base4NFDI, we investigate user perspectives on Base4NFDI since 2023. Following up on the Trend Survey on Research Data Infrastructures 2024 (Hartstein & Blümel, 2024), we contributed a survey module to the most recent DZHW Science Survey, a representatively sampled trend survey among researchers in Germany which yielded 15,000 responses overall. Apart from demographical variables (e.g. discipline, status group, gender), the DZHW Science Survey features questions on a wide variety of topics.

The survey module on research data infrastructures specifically addresses:
- Use and maintenance of research data infrastructures across disciplines,
- Disciplinary discourses on and needs for support with research data infrastructures,
- Recognition of NFDI basic services and NFDI consortia and their information channels, and
- Software and AI practices as well as perceived potential of the NFDI in solving challenges with AI in Science.

The results of the DZHW Science Survey will be paralleled with the earlier Trend Survey results about changes in practices, discourses, and needs for support. Thereby, the analysis informs the further development of the NFDI and its basic services as well as policy development in the field of research data infrastructures.

Speaker: Judith Hartstein (DZHW)

2026-07-22_ABSTRACT_User_Perspectives_Results_of_DZHW_Science_Survey.rtf

16:52 From Idea to Integration: Reconstructing the Development Process of Basic Services

Basic Services are one of the cornerstones of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), providing cross-disciplinary solutions for research data management and enabling interoperability across scientific communities. While considerable attention has been paid to the technical implementation and integration of these services, much less is known about the organizational and collaborative processes through which they emerge.
This poster presents the design of an ongoing qualitative study that investigates how Basic Services develop from initial ideas to their integration into the NFDI ecosystem. Rather than focusing on individual services or technical implementation, the project aims to reconstruct the development process itself, identifying key stages, decision points, actors, challenges and impacts.
The study employs a series of focus groups bringing together actors involved in different phases of Basic Service development. The focus groups are designed to jointly reconstruct the trajectory of service development, discuss critical challenges, and identify factors that facilitate or hinder successful integration.
The project seeks to answer questions such as: How are needs for Basic Services identified? How do ideas evolve into actually used services? Which actors shape decision-making throughout the process? What challenges arise during implementation and integration, and how are they negotiated?
By mapping these processes, the study aims to contribute a process-oriented perspective on Basic Service development that complements existing technical and organizational discussions. The findings are expected to support reflection on current development practices and provide insights for the future design, coordination, and sustainable integration of Basic Services within the NFDI.

Speaker: Nathalie Schwichtenberg (DZHW)

PosterAbstractSchwichtenberg.pdf

16:53 Beyond Static Snapshots: DBRepo as a Service for Sustainable, FAIR Relational Research Databases

Relational databases are widely used across research disciplines to manage complex, structured, and evolving data. Yet their sustainable operation remains a largely unresolved challenge in research data management. When projects end, databases are often reduced to static exports or abandoned together with the infrastructure required to operate them. While conventional repositories can preserve database dumps as files, this does not preserve the database as a functional, queryable research object.

DBRepo as a Service (DBRepo aaS) addresses this cross-cutting infrastructure gap. Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and coordinated by the University and State Library Darmstadt, the project is developing a low-threshold, sustainable, and FAIR-oriented service for hosting heterogeneous relational research databases. It builds on the open-source DBRepo software originally developed at TU Wien and aims to preserve databases as functional resources that remain accessible, queryable, and reusable beyond the lifetime of individual research projects.

DBRepo combines database operation with core research data management functionality. Databases and their contents can be described with metadata, queried through graphical and programmatic interfaces, and made persistently identifiable. Version-specific persistent identifiers enable reproducible citation of database states and query results, while semantic descriptions support interoperability and reuse.

A particular potential lies in combining DBRepo aaS with other research infrastructure services. Through its Python library, data stored in DBRepo can be accessed programmatically and loaded directly into environments such as Jupyter Notebooks, including as Pandas DataFrames. This creates a natural synergy with Jupyter4NFDI: DBRepo aaS can provide persistent, versioned, and citable relational data, while Jupyter4NFDI provides an environment for interactive analysis and reproducible computational workflows. Such complementary services could enable researchers to move seamlessly from managed research data to analysis without sacrificing provenance and citability.

DBRepo aaS further develops the platform through richer semantic annotation, AI-assisted natural-language querying, hosting options for database-specific presentation layers, and SIARD-based export workflows for long-term preservation.

The project therefore goes beyond providing another repository. It explores a sustainable service model for a class of research data that currently falls between conventional repository infrastructures and project-specific database hosting. The poster presents DBRepo aaS as a response to a potentially missing cross-cutting service need and invites the NFDI community to discuss integration scenarios with services such as Jupyter4NFDI, interoperability, governance and operating models, and pathways towards broader adoption within a federated research data infrastructure.

Speaker: Gerald Jagusch (TU Darmstadt)

Base4NFDI_user_conference_abstract_dbrepo.rtf

16:54 From FAIR Publication to FAIR Exploration: A Repository-to-Knowledge Graph Integration Architecture

From FAIR Publication to FAIR Exploration: A Repository-to-Knowledge Graph Integration Architecture
Authors:
Yuliia Dikova1, Volodymyr Kushnarenko1, Preston Rodrigues1, Nadiia Huskova1 and Thomas Boenisch1
yuliia.dikova@hlrs.de
1High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), University of Stuttgart

Abstract:
FAIR principles have improved the publication and long-term accessibility of research data. Repository platforms such as Dataverse enable researchers to publish datasets, assign persistent identifiers, preserve multiple versions, and make research outputs findable and accessible. In several scientific domains, repositories increasingly host not only descriptive metadata but also domain-specific semantic metadata, typically represented as RDF.
Publishing semantic metadata, however, does not automatically make these metadata easy to explore across multiple publications. While repositories allow researchers to discover individual datasets, answering scientific questions such as "Have similar experiments already been published?" or "Which publications contain comparable experimental conditions?" still requires downloading RDF files from multiple datasets, loading them into a local triple store, and manually combining them before any meaningful analysis can begin. As the number of published datasets grows, this process becomes increasingly repetitive and difficult to maintain.
In this contribution, we present an integration architecture that extends FAIR publication towards FAIR exploration without changing existing publication workflows. Rather than introducing another publication repository, the proposed approach connects an existing repository with a domain-specific semantic service that continuously synchronizes published semantic metadata into a shared knowledge graph. In our implementation within NFDI4Cat, this architecture is realized by integrating Repo4Cat repository with semantic platform SemMan4Cat .
SemMan4Cat periodically detects newly published or updated datasets through the Dataverse API, retrieves the published semantic metadata together with the associated publication metadata, validates the incoming RDF, manages versions, and incorporates the semantic content into a shared triple store. The repository remains the authoritative source for publication, preservation, citation, and long-term access, while the semantic platform complements these capabilities by providing services that general-purpose repositories typically do not offer.
Once synchronized, semantic metadata from multiple publications become immediately available for cross-publication querying, visualization, and semantic exploration. Researchers no longer need to repeatedly download and locally integrate RDF files in order to compare published experiments. Instead, they can explore the complete collection of synchronized semantic metadata and, whenever relevant results are identified, directly navigate back to the corresponding dataset, metadata files, and persistent identifiers stored in the repository. Figure 1 summarizes the proposed repository-to-knowledge graph integration architecture, highlighting the continuous synchronization of semantic metadata from Repo4Cat into SemMan4Cat and the navigation back to the original repository publications.

Figure 1 - FAIR Research Lifecycle

The integration is implemented using the Dataverse External Tools framework. Researchers can launch SemMan4Cat directly from a published Repo4Cat dataset without requiring a separate account for publicly available data. The selected publication serves as the starting point for semantic exploration across all synchronized publications, creating a seamless transition from repository search to knowledge graph exploration.
Our contribution presents the architecture and the first implementation of this repository-to-knowledge-graph integration. Rather than replacing existing repository infrastructures, the proposed approach demonstrates how reusable semantic services can extend them with advanced discovery and exploration capabilities while preserving repositories as the single authoritative publication platform. The proposed architecture is transferable to research communities that publish semantic metadata and require scalable cross-publication discovery while preserving repository-based publication workflows.

Keywords: Repository-to-Knowledge Graph Integration, Research Data Repositories, Semantic Metadata, Cross-Publication Discovery, FAIR Data

Speakers: Yuliia Dikova (High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), University of Stuttgart), Volodymyr Kushnarenko (High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), University of Stuttgart)

REpoandSem.drawio.png

Repo_and_Sem.rtf

16:55 Integrating KGI4NFDI as a key NFDI Basic Service through Incubator Cycles

KGI4NFDI is a Basic Service that supports the development of an interoperable knowledge graph ecosystem within the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and beyond. During its initialization phase, the service established consultation and guidance offerings, technical documentation, a central knowledge graph registry, and resources to promote interoperability across research communities. Building on these foundations, the integration phase expands the service portfolio through incubator programmes for the guided development of new knowledge graphs and reproducible deployment solutions for their sustainable operation. By combining expertise, infrastructure, and best practices, KGI4NFDI facilitates the creation, discovery, deployment, and interoperability of knowledge graphs, thereby strengthening cross-disciplinary research data integration within the NFDI and beyond.

Speaker: Till Sauerwein (ZB MED)

2026-11-20-3rd_Base4NFDI_user_conference_abstract_KGI4NFDI.rtf

16:56 Beyond content: Insights from a Six-Week Hybrid RDM Training Event

Effective Research Data Management (RDM) training depends not only on high-quality content but also on the choice of training formats and methods. During the Initialisation phase of the RDMTraining4NFDI basic service, we designed and evaluated a six-week hybrid training event for the NFDI community, combining onsite and online workshops, self-learning phases and a homework phase. Using surveys, interviews, and focus groups, we assessed participant motivation and satisfaction. Our findings highlight a clear preference for onsite training and provide practical recommendations for designing engaging RDM training. The poster also shares lessons learned from developing and delivering the event and invites the RDM community to exchange experiences and contribute to the future development of the basic service.

Speaker: Mareike Wohltmann (ZB MED - Information Centre for Life Sciences)

Base4NFDI_user_conference_abstract_RDMT4NFDI_Beyond_Content.rtf

16:57 Terminology Service Suite integration for WissKI authority data enrichment

Consistent use of authoritative terminologies is a prerequisite for
interoperable collection data across the German university collections
landscape. SODa (Sammlungen, Objekte,
Datenkompetenzen) builds data literacy and provides shared
infrastructure for this community; its Semantic Co-Working Space
(SCS) hosts containerised WissKI
Barrels -- domain-specific research
environments built on WissKI and CIDOC CRM.
Today, however, each Barrel still manages terminology lookup
independently. Authority sources such as GND, Getty Vocabularies,
GeoNames, and Wikidata are each integrated through a separate API
client, with bespoke autocomplete UI inside the WissKI Authority
Document
module.
Domain-specific controlled vocabularies (for example provenance event
types or conservation treatment categories) remain local custom terms
and are not discoverable beyond a single instance. The result is
fragmented maintenance, duplicated integration effort, and missed
opportunities for cross-consortium reuse.

This TS4NFDI Service Incubator addresses that gap. Over a six-month
cycle starting in Q3/2026, we will refactor the Authority Document
module so that terminology lookup and selection in WissKI editing forms
use Terminology Service Suite
(TSS)
widgets and route queries through the TS4NFDI API Gateway rather than
calling each provider directly. Selected terms will continue to be
stored as URIs in link fields, preserving compatibility with the WissKI
Default Data
Model, CIDOC
CRM paths, and Linked Open Data export. In parallel, we will publish one
or more terminology collections maintained by SODa and the Barrels
project via the API Gateway, making shared vocabularies reusable across
Barrels and beyond SODa.

Preparatory work is already in place: The linked open data management
system WissKI is technical foundation of WissKI Barrels; the Authority
Document module supports field-level authority linking for SCS and
Barrel deployments; and the Default Data Model installs a ready-to-use
Pathbuilder environment for collection cataloguing. What is missing is a
shared Basic Service path -- standard widgets, unified discovery and
caching, and collection provisioning -- rather than yet another
provider-specific client.

Collaboration with TS4NFDI focuses on widget integration guidance in a
Drupal/WissKI form context, API Gateway onboarding for SODa collections,
provider mapping for the authority sources required in material-culture
cataloguing, and iterative testing with museum and collection-domain
users. For our part, we contribute a dedicated contact person, a staging
environment in SCS, user testing in realistic cataloguing workflows, and
maintainer documentation so that new Barrels can adopt terminology
sources without custom development.

Keywords: terminology services, collection data, linked open data,
WissKI

Speaker: Robert Nasarek (Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg)

Terminology Service Suite integration for WissKI.odt

16:58 Implementing OSVDI for Remote, High-Performance Access as a service for NFDI consortia and beyond

The NFDI4BIOIMAGE consortium, operating within the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), is currently developing a comprehensive ecosystem of new file formats, metadata standards, and reusable analysis pipelines. A critical bottleneck in this ecosystem is the physical proximity typically required to handle large-scale, high-resolution image data. Traditional data transfer is often inefficient and can be prohibited by strict security or privacy constraints. To resolve this, we present OSVDI, an Open Source Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution designed to provide remote, interactive, and high-performance access to specialized UI based computing environments. By streaming a familiar desktop interface to the end-user while keeping the data localized, OSVDI extends the reach of imaging facilities and provides a scalable framework for distributed training and collaborative research. This allows researchers to leverage specialized GPUs and optimized workstations from any endpoint—ranging from legacy PCs and thin clients to modern laptops and tablets—without the latency typically associated with remote desktops.

VDI solutions rely on the interplay of various hardware and software components. Unlike commercial vendors who offer these as bundled products, the open-source landscape consists of separate components that must be integrated manually. This often leads to a lack of seamlessness or compatibility issues between modules. OSVDI addresses this by refining existing open-source approaches and developing the missing components needed for a fully integrated solution. Centralized desktop operations are powered by server-based GPUs, providing hardware-accelerated rendering for virtual machines (VMs) and fluid video playback. Using specialized Intel graphics cards, the host hardware is flexibly partitioned into multiple virtual units to support diverse workload requirements. A centralized access gateway provides the entry point for VDI resources. This is integrated into the existing IAM4NFDI variants via Keycloak using OIDC. The technical efficiency of the system is rooted in its ability to maintain high-resolution, graphics-intensive performance while keeping bandwidth requirements moderate, typically requiring only 10 Mbit/s for Full HD and under 100 Mbit/s for higher resolutions. Because the data remains resident near the source at the computing center, data management is significantly simplified and infrastructure security is bolstered.

Beyond individual research, this architecture serves a vital role in distributed online trainings a usecase required by many consortia and research instituions in general. By providing standardized, high-performance training environments, OSVDI ensures that participants in online courses receive a quality of experience comparable to that of local, in-person events.

This development is a collaborative effort hosted by the Computing Center of the University of Freiburg and supported by NFDI4BIOIMAGE and the bwCloud 3 service development project. Committed to the principles of open science, the project provides a publicly accessible demo via DFN-AAI authentication at https://demo.osvdi.uni-freiburg.de/. All source code, interaction pathways, and comprehensive documentation are maintained on GitLab at https://gitlab.uni-freiburg.de/opensourcevdi/, ensuring that the infrastructure can be reused and extended by the broader scientific community.

Speakers: Dirk von Suchodoletz (University of Freiburg, Computer Center), Michael Scherle (University of Freiburg, Computer Center)

Base4NFDI_VDI-Service.odt

16:59 Bringing Ontologies into practice: The NFDI4ING Metadata Profile Service

The NFDI4ING Metadata Profile Service supports research communities in translating ontologies and terminologies into reusable metadata profiles. This poster showcases the complete profile lifecycle, including collaborative profile development, integration with NFDI Basic Services, and the reuse of metadata profiles across research infrastructures and knowledge graph applications.

Speaker: Jacquline Wormstädt (Technical University Darmstadt)

Base4NFDI_user_conference_abstract_poster.pdf

17:00 The Basic Service TS4NFDI is coming of age - The final steps of the Integration Phase and the road to the Ramp-Up Phase

Terminologies are essential for semantically linking research data across disciplines, ensuring conceptual alignment even with different nomenclatures. Standardised terminologies promote interoperability and data integration, making data understandable and reusable across various sources and fields. Furthermore, terminologies are used in services and tools for annotating and linking research, necessitating the development of several Terminology Services (TSs) for publishing, describing, and curating terminologies. Aligning, managing, and developing these TSs is challenging but crucial for consensus-building and harmonisation across disciplines. [1]

Since its first participation [2] at the UC4B in 2024, the Basic Service Terminology Services 4 NFDI (TS4NFDI) has moved from the Initialisation Phase to the Integration Phase. During the Integration Phase, the TS4NFDI project team continued to work towards the following objectives: standardising and harmonising terminology management within the NFDI, facilitating consensus and interoperability across disciplines, and achieving a shared knowledge representation framework. To accomplish these objectives, TS4NFDI developed the following components during the Integration Phase: a Service Portal, a centralised API Gateway, a Terminology Service Suite (TSS), and an NFDI-wide Mapping Service.

The Service Portal [3] addresses the needs mentioned above by offering a single point of access, enabling users to conveniently discover, compare, and utilise relevant terminologies across existing TSs of relevance for disciplines in the NFDI. It also provides a dashboard for configuring the various parameters of the underlying API Gateway. The API Gateway is a centralised, adaptable service that enables federated calls across multiple TSs within the NFDI and beyond. The TSS complements these components by providing a collection of web widgets that facilitate the integration of TSs into other services, and offering a rich user experience for interacting with terminologies. Finally, the NFDI-wide Mapping Service facilitates cross-domain interoperability by aligning terminologies from different disciplines. It allows users to create, manage, retrieve, and review mappings between concepts from different terminologies.

In addition to the technical development of service components, TS4NFDI established its own incubator programme during the Integration Phase. The programme was a resounding success, attracting around 30 projects from 18 different consortia involved. This contribution will provide an overview of the TS4NFDI incubator programme, showcasing highlights of each of its four cycles.

As an outlook, the contribution will provide a first glimpse of the approved Ramp-Up Phase of TS4NFDI, during which the project will evolve into a sustainable, operational Basic Service for the NFDI consortia. Building on the results of the Integration Phase, the focus will be on scaling and maturing the four service components, establishing governance and long-term sustainability frameworks, and strengthening community engagement through the TS4NFDI incubator programme. During the Ramp-Up Phase, TS4NFDI focuses on further integration into the EOSC ecosystem, i.e. EOSC Node Germany. [4] To achieve this, the project will contribute to selected EOSC-related events, focusing particularly on terminology infrastructures and interoperability.

Keywords: terminology service, ontology mappings, ontology, terminology, semantic web

[1] Baum, Roman, Kolja Bailly, Syphax Bouazzouni, et al. 2024. Terminology Services 4 NFDI (TS4NFDI) - Integration Phase Proposal. October 11. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13921325.

[2] Baum, Roman, Jan Fillies, Naouel Karam, Oliver Koepler, Pooya Oladazimi, and Julia Sasse. 2024. ‘First Steps of the Basic Service Terminology Services 4 NFDI - Step by Step through the Initialization to the Integration Phase’. November 21. https://events.gwdg.de/event/658/contributions/2387/.

[3] Oladazimi, Pooya, Kolja Bailly, Roman Baum, et al. 2025. TS4NFDI Service Portal. August 4. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16735917.

[4] Baum, Roman, Julia Sasse, Jakob Voß, Naouel Karam, and Oliver Koepler. 2026. Terminology Services 4 NFDI (TS4NFDI) - Ramp-Up Phase Proposal. July 3. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21258614.

Speaker: Mr Roman Baum (ZB MED)

The Basic Service TS4NFDI is coming of age - The final steps of the Integration Phase and the road to the Ramp-Up Phase.pdf

The Basic Service TS4NFDI is coming of age - The final steps of the Integration Phase and the road to the Ramp-Up Phase.rtf

17:01 → 17:30 Coffee break: Posters displayed

17:30 → 17:45 Welcome & Opening by Reinhard Altenhöner

17:45 → 18:45 Keynote by Sabina Leonelli; Moderation: Reinhard Altenhöner

19:00 → 22:00 Reception: Posters displayed

Wednesday 25 November

09:00 → 09:20 Welcome note

09:20 → 10:10 Keynote by Christian Grimm; Moderation: Raphael Ritz

10:10 → 10:20 Coffee break: for possible change of rooms

10:20 → 11:30 Short presentations,: Session 1; Moderation: Sonja Schimmler

10:20 Building a Sustainable Future for Research Data: A Distributed Storage Layer for Basic Services

This talk proposes a strategic shift in the operating model for Basic Services: the integration of a distributed storage network layer based on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). By decoupling the data layer from the application layer, the NFDI can ensure that the “Basic” in Basic Services refers not only to the functionality provided but to the fundamental, sustainable stability of the data itself.

Speaker: Stefan Hynek (SUB Göttingen)

Base4NFDI_user_conference_abstract_template.rtf

10:30 NFDI Standards for Interoperable Research Data and Services

Standards in research data management (RDM) make research data and RDM services interoperable. This submission describes the process that NFDI uses to develop, officially adopt und establish NFDI standards in practice. As a first standard candidate, the recommendation to register NFDI repositories in re3data is presented.

Speaker: Cord Wiljes (Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI) e.V.)

UC$B2026_NFDI-Standards.pdf

UC$B2026_NFDI-Standards.rtf

10:40 Driving Federated Infrastructures in the NFDI: An Impulse from Section Common Infrastructures and Working Group Overall Architecture

The Common Infrastructures section coordinates cooperation between NFDI consortia and external stakeholders to build federated infrastructures and software components. Serving as a central contact point for basic services—many rooted in the section's working groups—it identifies jointly usable components, ensures interoperability, and advances a shared Research Data Commons (RDC) as outlined in the section concept. Comprising 10 specialized working groups (e.g., on IAM and LTA), the section relies on the Overall Architecture working group to form their vital technical connection while establishing sustainable technology partnerships and representing the NFDI in initiatives like the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

The Overall Architecture working group creates a practical framework for the technical evolution of the NFDI through an iterative, consensus-driven process. Driven by a series of expert workshops—including events in Göttingen and Aachen, with a third workshop planned—it brings together representatives from consortia and basic services to validate a shared architecture map. Rather than imposing a rigid top-down design, it decouples infrastructure provision from scientific applications using a layered reference model spanning Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

This overall architecture provides a unified reference model that all discipline-specific consortia can map their local infrastructures towards. By relying on organic convergence, the structured layered model decouples underlying hardware complexities from domain-specific applications, allowing consortia to maintain tailored scientific workflows while ensuring seamless cross-disciplinary data sharing and alignment with European frameworks including EOSC.

The DFG storage funding initiatives address critical infrastructure gaps by enabling academic and research stakeholders to establish robust data storage systems for the NFDI consortia. The Storage working group actively accompanies these calls by gathering consortium requirements, facilitating provider matchmaking based on structured collection reports, and supporting implementation based on the overall architecture and use. This concerted action bridges grassroots needs with institutional hardware providers to ensure reliable integration into the federated architecture.

With the NFDI facing another 10-year funding perspective, cross-cutting activities are vital for translating long-term strategic visions into reality. Future plans involve refining technical components, standardizing interfaces, and translating European requirements into technical specifications for EOSC Node Germany.

The talk highlights how the Common Infrastructures section—uniting its 10 working groups and incubated basic services through the Overall Architecture working group—drives the federation of the 26 NFDI consortia. It covers the collaborative workshop series, the validated overall architecture, the storage calls, and the roadmap for the next decade of sustainable infrastructure development.

Speaker: Sonja Schimmler (TU Berlin)

2026_SectionInfra_UC4B.pdf

10:50 PIDs before publication: putting the pid4cat registry into operation

pid4cat closes the gap between lab systems and the global PID graph. It mints Handle.Net-based identifiers where samples originate: in the ELN, not much later at publication time. It gives every PID metadata: status, type, curation contact, license, change history and DataCite-like relations to other PIDs. Partners manage their own namespace. A Handle server, in production since 2024, is extended with a new PID-registry API service. The system is open source, domain-agnostic, and looks for adopters beyond catalysis.

Speaker: Dr David Linke (Leibniz-Institut für Katalyse e.V. (LIKAT), Rostock, Germany)

20260728v6_Abstract_PID4Cat-for-Base4NFDI-User-Conference2026.rtf

11:00 Leveraging the DMP4NFDI Base Service for FAIRagro to benefit real-life RDM

Data management plans (DMPs) are an essential component of the modern research data life cycle and are increasingly mandatory for German and EU funding calls. DMP services were therefore identified as a cornerstone element for FAIRagro, the NFDI consortium for agricultural systems sciences [1]. Thanks to the existing expertise within the FAIRagro co-applicant institutions, the decision was made to provide the ‘Research Data Management Organiser’ (RDMO) as a tool for the guided creation and maintenance of data management plans, together with templates specific to agricultural system sciences. When the DMP4NFDI base service was launched, FAIRagro decided to cooperate with this base service for hosting, rather than maintaining its own instance, leading to cooperation that spanned multiple incubator projects. This talk will present the different incubator projects and how FAIRagro and DMP4NFDI benefit from the collaboration.
In the first incubator project, DMP4NFDI set up an RDMO client for FAIRagro, reducing operational burdens, and easing improved interoperability with other NFDI consortia and the broader RDMO community. The DMP4NFDI team provided a ready‑to‑use RDMO test and productive client that enabled FAIRagro to test out the service in a cooperation, with the Bavarian State Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Forestry, implementing a dedicated template for their funding calls [2].
Originally, FAIRagro worked on an agriculture-specific template based on the RDMO pre-defined DFG Checklist, but decided in a second incubator project to align these efforts with the Template Framework [3], developed by DMP4NFDI, linking the template to the RDA DMP common standard for machine-actionable data management [4]. This further increases interoperability across consortia and institutional RDMO developments that are also building on the Template Framework. Within this incubator project, answer options and help texts of the template were adapted for the agrosystem domains, and links to relevant FAIRagro resources and services were provided. For example, users can now directly contact the FAIRagro Helpdesk if they require support or more information on a question asked within RDMO.
Finally, to promote the template and gather feedback, FAIRagro also participated in a third incubator project focused on community outreach. DMP4NFDI supported this by organizing a workshop, where participants could create their own DMP for their project, section by section. Their feedback will be used to further improve the FAIRagro template.
Besides these actions, FAIRagro is also a use case in an incubator project between DMP4NFDI and TS4NFDI, to identify template questions where predefined terminologies enhance the template’s interoperability and reusability, showcasing a cooperation between multiple base services and their application for a consortium.
[1] Specka X, Martini D, Weiland C, et al. FAIRagro: Ein Konsortium in der Nationalen Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI) für Forschungsdaten in der Agrosystemforschung. Inform Spektrum 2023;46:24–35. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00287-022-01520-w.
[2] FAIRagro and the bavarian StMELF – a story about cultural change in RDM | NFDI n.d. https://www.nfdi.de/fairagro-and-the-bavarian-stmelf-a-story-about-cultural-change-in-rdm/?lang=en (accessed July 29, 2026).
[3] Schönau S, Windeck J, Gonzalez Ocanto M, et al. The NFDI DMP Template Framework 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16737079.
[4] Miksa T, Walk P, Neish P. RDA DMP Common Standard for Machine-actionable Data Management Plans 2020. https://doi.org/10.15497/rda00039.

Speaker: Antonia Leidel (Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research)

UC4B2026_abstract.pdf

11:10 Connecting Base Services to the NFDIxCS Zero-Trust-Architecture

Open Science does not necessarily mean that everything should be made openly available. Researchers should have the decision to openly share their research data and software or to publish their research output with restrictions due to privacy concerns for research participants, political sensitivities, or commercial reasons. Either way, robust research infrastructure should guard the services provided for researchers to be resilient against malicious use of data or attacks. Trust and security are the main drivers for this purpose.
For this reason, NFDIxCS has designed an architecture in which trust and security rank among the highest priorities for structuring its services. This requires building a controlled environment organized into security zones, where services and users must be authenticated, and only identified services can communicate freely within their zone or through controlled bridges to neighbouring zones. Zone-based access carries inherent risk: co-location within a zone may falsely imply trustworthiness, creating an attack surface. Authentication counters this by validating identity independent of zone placement. Together, these measures implement zero trust principles by combining structural containment with identity verification.
This architecture serves not only to secure internal communication but also to integrate external services, such as NFDI4Base services and other existing services in the research data and software management landscape. NFDIxCS services are primarily centred around the creation of Research Data Management Containers (RDMCs), for example the RDMC Creation Workflow, the RDMC Search Engine, and Metabase. The RDMC Creation Workflow guides users through the process of assembling research artefacts, creates a Reusable Execution Environment to test the artefact, adds metadata, and publishes the results into an archive. This connects with the RDMC Search Engine, which provides users easy access to search for created RDMCs. Metabase provides entry points for standardized metadata standards such as ontologies and offers a reasoning service based on given data and combined ontologies. These services already use NFDI4Base services. IAM4NFDI is connected to services for user identification. PID4NFDI is integrated into the publishing process of RDMCs for creating metadata-enriched ePIC PIDs. TS4NFDI is integrated into RDMC creation to add standardized metadata. In upcoming work, other base services such as DMP4NFDI and KGI4NFDI will be connected to internal services, but the use case needs to be worked out.
This contribution demonstrates how NFDI4Base services are technically used and integrated within NFDIxCS, and how services can be integrated into a secure environment. The development of infrastructure in NFDI is highly decentralized due to discipline-specific consortia and different research institutions. Reusing services is a central aspect. With similar security mechanisms, local resilience can be maintained without losing efficiency in cooperation. This contribution is one piece in this puzzle.

Speaker: Jan Bernoth (Universität Potsdam- NFDIxCS)

2026-07-31_NFDIxCS_Base4NFDI_user_conference_abstract.pdf

11:20 Accounting4NFDI – Shaping Resource Accounting Together with the NFDI Community

Accounting4NFDI addresses the challenge of heterogeneous accounting solutions across the NFDI by focusing on interoperability rather than replacement. Initial analyses show that many consortia already operate mature, domain-specific systems that are difficult to integrate due to differing models, interfaces, and semantics. The project therefore develops a common framework with shared abstractions and interfaces, aligned with initiatives such as IAM4NFDI and EOSC Accounting. Through incubators and collaboration with early adopters, practical integration strategies are evaluated, while a prototype dashboard demonstrates cross-consortia aggregation and visualization of accounting data. The work highlights interoperability as the key enabler for a federated accounting ecosystem within NFDI.

Speakers: Marcel Nellesen (RWTH Aachen University), See-Ling Wong (GWDG)

Base4NFDI_user_conference_abstract_accounting4nfdi.pdf

10:20 → 11:30 Short presentations,: Session 2; Moderation: Najla Rettberg

10:20 Establishing a Sustainable Support Hub: the national Da-ta Competence Center Come2Data in Saxony

As a national data competence center with a focus on Saxony, Come2Data aims to foster the practical development of data literacy across diverse sectors, including academia, public administration, the general public, and, in the future, the private sector. The project consoli-dates existing data science training and support offerings from participating institutions, leveraging expertise in research data management (e.g., SaxFDM), the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), high-performance computing, and advanced analytical methods for data-intensive, interdisciplinary research applications such as artificial intelligence and data modeling (e.g., ScADS.AI).

The primary objective is to integrate and synergize the diverse local, regional, and national activities in Saxony into a sustainable training and support framework. This framework em-phasizes key areas such as data management, data integration, data analysis, and data pub-lication. A centralized virtual platform serves as the cornerstone for this initiative, providing researchers, educators, and learners with access to resources, training, and networking op-portunities.

A critical component of this platform is the implementation of a sustainable support system in the form of a (Legal) Helpdesk. This Helpdesk offers comprehensive Level-1 support through a knowledge base and facilitates specialized Level-2 support by connecting users with domain experts.

Here, we introduce the solutions developed over the past two years to address the technical, infrastructural, and organizational challenges of this initiative: we implemented IAM4nfdi as CAAI to access the various educational and support resources of SuiteCRM, which we set up as an open source modular system with integrated data base (Maria DB with possibility to RDF format conversion/sparkle endpoint) and ticket module, just to name a few milestones.

Pursuing this path, we aim to contribute to the development of data competencies in Saxony and beyond, fostering a robust and sustainable data ecosystem.

Speaker: Dr Franziska Korb-King (Technische Universität Dresden)

2026-07-29_Base4NFDI-UserConference_Abstract_DKZ-Come2Data.pdf

10:30 Towards an NFDI Service Portfolio

In this talk, we will present the governance model, service criteria, and the next steps towards a central NFDI Service Portfolio. We will also discuss how the portfolio can support the integration of Base4NFDI services, identify cross-cutting service needs, and strengthen interoperability with EOSC. We look forward to discussing with the community how services should be represented within the portfolio and how the portfolio can best support researchers and service providers across disciplines.

Speakers: Julia Armin (Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI) e.V.), Lukas Jansen (Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI) e.V.)

2026-07-29_UC4B_Abstract_Serviceportfolio.pdf

10:40 The NFDI, basic services and beyond. Insights from the concomitant research on Base4NFDI.

The concomitant research of Base4NFDI assesses the impact of the basic services within the NFDI and the wider community. It also sheds light on the organization and execution of infrastructural work within the German research data ecosystem. This talk will provide a brief overview of the three dimensions of the concomitant research - users, providers, and processes—and highlight some of its results.

Speaker: Alexander Schniedermann (ZHHW)

UC4B_abstract_talk.doc

10:50 Between Local Services and National Infrastructure: How Do We Make the Leap to a Networked RDM Service Landscape?

This talk introduces the work of Work Package 3 of the DFG project FDLink, which aims to network research data management (RDM) services from various universities and supraregional infrastructures. The focus is on the development of use cases for cross-institutional RDM services, which are based on benchmarking, expert interviews, and practical examples and are used to further develop the UpdateFDM maturity model. The use cases highlight the organizational, communicative, and strategic prerequisites for a coordinated service ecosystem and serve as a foundation for better coordinating RDM offerings and facilitating researchers’ access to appropriate services.

Speaker: Ms Cathleen Schöne (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Base4NFDI_FDLink_WP3_Between Local Services and National Infrastructure How Do We Make the Leap to a Networked RDM Service Landscape.doc

11:00 Operational models for NFDI (basic) services – how ULB Darmstadt tackles the task pragmatically

For many years, the University and State Library Darmstadt has been offering several RDM services within and for the NFDI in various contexts (NFDI4ING, Base4NFDI, and a number of DFG-funded projects) – and beyond this, for example within the Hessian FDM state initiative, HeFDI. Like all service providers, we are faced with the question of how to ensure the long-term sustainability of these project-funded services and offerings, how to reconcile different project durations, and how to secure reliable funding for staff and retain them. All of this takes place against the backdrop of the NFDI’s reorganisation from 2028 onwards and the process of finding the right position for a medium-sized library within the NFDI’s future operational network.
The presentation sets out our general pragmatic approach, our specific approach to operational models and various examples of these, including, amongst others,

• RDMO as part of the DMP4NFDI basic service project (https://dmp.services.base4nfdi.de) and, beyond that, as ‘RDMO as a
  Service’ (www.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/rdmo-aas)
• DFG projects at various stages of development:
• ‘DBRepo as a Service’ (www.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/forschen_publizieren/forschen/dbrepo.en.jsp)
• 'Architectural RDM Pipeline’ (https://www.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/forschen_publizieren/forschen/ardmp.en.jsp)
• IDOVIR (https://idovir.com)
• NFDI4ING services relating to RDF metadata
• small but tailored services, such as the shared use of TU Darmstadt’s institutional data repository by universities of applied
  sciences in Hesse.

The presentation focuses in particular on contractual issues and costing mechanisms as key areas of concern, and outlines ways in which the approach can be adapted and standardised, including in the context of the efforts to develop a strategy to build a national library infrastructure within the DFG-VIGO project ‘VESABI’ (https://www.bibliotheksverband.de/vesabi).

Speaker: Gerald Jagusch (TU Darmstadt)

Abstract_Jagusch_UC4BS_2026_englisch.docx

11:10 FEATURED TALK The Legal Foundation of the Helmholtz Cloud: Insights into the Development of a Framework of Contracts for a Federated Cloud

Within just a few years, the Helmholtz Cloud has developed from a technological concept into a viable digital infrastructure for research within the Helmholtz Association. What is often overlooked is that building such a federated cloud requires not only technical innovation but also a comprehensive legal framework that meets the specific requirements of publicly funded research institutions.

HIFIS (Helmholtz Federated IT Services) is a platform within the Helmholtz Information & Data Science Framework . The team has taken on the task of making the selected powerful services of the individual Helmholtz centers available beyond institutional boundaries within the Helmholtz Cloud. This is ensured by a seamless IT infrastructure that connects knowledge and expertise from all centers. This approach ensures not only technological interoperability but also legal consistency across center boundaries.

The legal basis of the Helmholtz Cloud is the result of an intensive coordination process involving numerous working groups and institutional departments. At the core of these discussions is the Helmholtz Cloud Ruleset, which now serves as a binding agreement for all 18 Helmholtz Centers and the Head Office. This framework clearly addresses key contractual aspects such as liability, duration, responsibility, rights, and obligations for the centers providing and using Helmholtz Cloud services.

Particular challenging was the incorporation of legal frameworks, whose precise wording and negotiation with various stakeholders often lead to delays compared to technical integration’s. The legal environment has to include the general requirements of civil law. However, the provisions of EU state aid law, German value-added tax law, and, of course, the European GDPR must also be observed. The task was to balance these requirements so that they cover the specific use case of the Helmholtz Cloud. To comply with these legal requirements, a consistent distinction must be made when using Helmholtz Cloud services between non-economic activities as defined by EU state aid law and other use cases.

The presentation highlights the lessons learned from this long-term process and demonstrates how legal negotiations and technological development can go hand in hand to create a sustainable federated cloud infrastructure.

Speaker: Annette Spicker (HZB)

Base4NFDI_user_conference_helmholtz_cloud_legal_abstract.doc

11:30 → 12:10 Coffee break: Posters displayed

12:10 → 12:30 Business Model #1: Pitches of Basic Services; Moderation: Bernhard Miller

Sustainability is a key concern for users and providers of RDM services alike. Thus in a community-driven endeavor like NFDI it is also a shared responsibility to make services sustainable. Yet, the one key mechanism to assure sustainability – “business models” – are often either considered boring, to be somebody else’s problem, or even anathema to the open science ideal. This session will make transparent, how current NFDI Basic Services plan for their sustainable operation. It will also take a broader perspective and look at different ways to operate and finance RDM services, discuss perspectives on different roles and responsibilities, and help raise a joint understanding of the relevance of designing who pays. Guests include Christian Grimm (DFN Managing Director), Björn Hagemeier (Head of ATML Data Management and Analytics, FZ Jülich; Jupyter4NFDI), Ulrike Lucke (Chair of Complex Multimedia Application Architectures, University of Potsdam), Heidi Seibold (Co-Founder Digital Research Academy and ondatix), Gerald Jagusch (DMP4NFDI, TU Darmstadt).

12:30 → 13:25 Business Model #2: Panel; Moderation: Bernhard Miller

Sustainability is a key concern for users and providers of RDM services alike. Thus in a community-driven endeavor like NFDI it is also a shared responsibility to make services sustainable. Yet, the one key mechanism to assure sustainability – “business models” – are often either considered boring, to be somebody else’s problem, or even anathema to the open science ideal. This session will make transparent, how current NFDI Basic Services plan for their sustainable operation. It will also take a broader perspective and look at different ways to operate and finance RDM services, discuss perspectives on different roles and responsibilities, and help raise a joint understanding of the relevance of designing who pays. Guests include Christian Grimm (DFN Managing Director), Björn Hagemeier (Head of ATML Data Management and Analytics, FZ Jülich; Jupyter4NFDI), Ulrike Lucke (Chair of Complex Multimedia Application Architectures, University of Potsdam), Heidi Seibold (Co-Founder Digital Research Academy and ondatix), Gerald Jagusch (DMP4NFDI, TU Darmstadt).

13:25 → 13:30 Closing by Reinhard Altenhöner

13:30 → 14:30 Farewell lunch (togo options)

14:00 → 16:00 (INTERNAL MEETING) Base4NFDI & Basic Service Teams