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Overarching activities of DataPLANT in the evolvement of the NFDI

Fri Mar 25 2022

With the completed onboarding of the second round of NFDI consortia the activities within the various bodies of the NFDI Association are significantly on the rise and DataPLANT is getting more deeply involved in NFDI activities than originally foreseen. Activities are required in several fields starting from contributions to the four (later more) sections of the NFDI, providing input to various topics like DSI/Nagoya or cooperation with other NFDI consortia and contribution to the NFDI as a whole.

The most relevant activity in the last couple of month was the contribution of input to the “Stellungnahme” and the follow-up kickoff of the grant application of Base4NFDI (basic services for NFDI consortia). This resulted in a Letter-of-Intent sent to the DFG on 21st March where DataPLANT is in a participants role. Through these activities the DataPLANT community has the chance to further shape the vision of the “OneNFDI” in exchange with the other consortia.

Beside the still ongoing base services application the NFDI sections require attention as they are part of the cross-domain topics. At the moment four sections exist, which will get complemented by more in the future:

  • Common Infrastructures
  • Section Metadata, Terminologies & Provenance
  • Section Training and Education
  • Section Ethical and Legal Aspects

In Common Infrastructures the following initial set of working groups got created by now:

  • Data Integration
  • Long Term Archival,
  • Identity and Access Management,
  • Federated Multicloud,
  • Research Software Engineering. More working groups are to be expected in the sections when the formal inauguration process with the election of speakers is finalized.

The ongoing activities in relation to the NFDI association as well as the basic service application, demands us to shift the initial distribution of (especially human) resources a bit more into this direction. Accordingly, the following points must be addressed more intensively in the future:

  • Fine-tune our delegation model: To ensure an efficient division of labor in meeting the objective described above, individuals are delegated to the respective rounds. If tasks are distributed, the delegated person is responsible for coordinating their execution.
  • Development of long-term and sustainable strategies for funding opportunities for NFDI. For this purpose, strategies already developed within DataPLANT have been brought to the attention of the DFG.
  • In addition to high-level coordination activities, collaboration with other consortia will be intensified. With the NFDI4BioImaging initiative, applicant of the third round, we are in exchange about imaging data. With MatWerk we discuss a possible extension of the ARC regarding the description of materials and an ontology service.
  • Cooperation and exchange with other initiatives and should be promoted at various levels. Here the activities of Elixir Plants or DSI/Nagoya could be relevant for the DataPLANT community.