DataPLANT Task Areas

#Task Area 1

Data Quality, Standardization, Interoperability

Promotes topics such as data quality assurance, interoperability and standardization including AI-based approaches, to facilitate the collection of vocabularies and ontologies, encouraging broader community participation. The task area will further its efforts to enhance data and workflow interoperability, focusing on semantic understandability and machine actionability to maximize user benefits. Central to this effort is the ongoing support and development of a standardized annotation principle. This principle bridges user documentation with specific technological endpoints, workflow engines, domain-specific requirements, search engines, and data indexing services, thereby improving data FAIRness. Expert assistance will be provided for the collection and management of missing vocabulary needed for metadata annotation, tailored to community needs and encouraging active participation. To ensure the quality of (meta)data, we will implement automatic validation processes that support an envisioned journal-like peer-review system for data publication. Additionally, we will promote RDM practices that support a culture of error acknowledgment within the community.

These efforts will be conducted to strengthen and coordinate standardization efforts in plant research-related data and workflow annotation and will be closely linked with other relevant NFDIs nationally, and e.g. ELIXIR, EOSC, IPPN, MIAPPE, and RO-Crate internationally.

#Task Area 2

Infrastructure, Service, and Workflow Platform

Enhances the DataPLANT DataHUB and associated services to ensure deep integration with both national and international infrastructures. This includes platforms such as the NFDI Research Data Commons, OpenAIRE, EOSC, and EBI. This evolution embraces the envisioned multi-cloud environment and the NFDI AAI concept to support a federated landscape through an infrastructure-as-a-service distribution and maintenance model.

These efforts aim to improve the visibility and recognition of DataPLANT by journals, the NFDI, the EU, and key international RDM initiatives and stakeholders. Task Area 2 supports efficient data management and analysis, enabling the execution of actionable FAIR Digital Objects (FDOs) within established workflow environments. It will leverage consortium cloud environments and the NFDI FAIR data spaces to implement an infrastructure-as-a-service model for distribution and maintenance.

#Task Area 3

Software, Application, and Transfer

Promotes an open-source culture, encouraging participation and skill development in research data projects and software. To achieve sustainable development, the task area will seek to educate and empower members of the community to participate in shaping software evolution and its application through both onboarding and training materials as well as a community-directed feature process. TA3 aims to understand how the software solutions developed can benefit from and bring benefit to other communities, nationally (NFDI) and internationally.

TA3 directly fosters community engagement by offering personalized support through tailored digital assistance. It also refines and consolidates the plant FAIR Digital Object (FDO) software stack to enhance interoperability with other NFDI and international RDM services. This will include the development of improved documentation, tutorials, and teaching materials, empowering active community participation through transparent, community-driven feedback and development processes. Additionally, TA3 will establish a support framework for embedded and geo-distributed data stewards. It will provide open educational resources and implement a “train the trainer” model.

#Task Area 4

Coordination and Management

Focuses on efficiently managing the consortium and ensuring alignment with community-driven objectives. TA4 coordinates the dissemination of project information and outcomes from all task areas, ensuring that all stakeholders, both within and outside the consortium, are well-informed. It will also establish bidirectional advocacy structures and create low-barrier participation opportunities for the broader community and beyond. Additionally, TA4 forms special interest groups for the life sciences (LS), address legal matters, represent the consortium in dealings with the DFG, and foster collaboration among state-level initiatives, compute centers, faculty IT, research institutions, libraries, and NFDI liaison efforts to drive consolidation.