At the core of our Task Area 3 – 2Interoperate - is the
further advancement of FAIRness in NFDI4Earth, with a special focus
on the “I” (interoperability) of participating infrastructures and services.
The
NFDI4Earth Architecture
documents general constraints of
NFDI4Earth's key data services including central support services, APIs,
underlying infrastructure setup, and linked community services, such as re3data
and the DataHub.
Our
NFDI4Earth Ontology
enables the characterization of core infrastructures as well as data and service types, along with the standards
required to make them interoperable. We
harvest and integrate heterogeneous service information
from sustainable resources involving both
automatic (baseline) and curation. Our NFDI4Earth Label for Interoperability encapsulates key requirements for
infrastructures and services to facilitate the integration into NFDI4Earth ecosystem of services.
Our task area receives data streams and impulses from the task
Areas
2Participate
(Pilots, Education, Academy) and 2Facilitate (User Support, OneStop4All) which provide
relevant information on FAIR research data management through their
interactions with users. The architecture, FAIR standards, and the NFDI4Earth
Label are developed cooperatively. Wherever possible, all types of stakeholders
are involved, embedding NFDI4Earth within NFDI as well as in both the
international ESS infrastructure landscape and the research data community (Research
Data Alliance/RDA, Committee on Data of the International
Science Council/CODATA).
Our
Knowledge Hub
manages information about semantic resources and serves
as NFDI4Earth's semantic backbone service. It allows users to request service
information, such as repository metadata and the NFDI4Earth Label status,
thereby supporting the reuse of this information for developing their own
applications.
Our
Living Handbook
provides a comprehensive overview of NFDI4Earth
services and products (e.g., interoperability evaluation criteria for the
NFDI4Earth Label and NFDI4Earth pilot projects). It enables the sharing of
community showcases for FAIR data and software and provides information on how
to
register services
. The
Living Handbook Editorial Board
curates the content of the Living Handbook,
supports its authors and optimises the editorial workflow. Both the Knowledge
Hub and the Living Handbook are developed in close interaction with
Task Area 4 – 2Coordinate
.
We regularly perform gap analyses of Earth system science
user workflows to identify missing interfaces, service needs, performance
improvements, convergence toward common standards, demands for new services,
and suggestions for cross-linking with external services. This is done, for
example, in dialogue with users at events like the EGU General Assembly and
with our NFDI4Earth pilots. These gap analyses trigger actions within
2Coordinate
to implement missing services on a prototype
basis, such as AI-driven tools. In close collaboration with 2Facilitate, we
develop metadata recommendations, with a special emphasis on improvement of the
quality of metadata for governmental data according to researchers’ and
providers’ needs.
You can find our project reports and recommendations, as well
as those from the other Task Areas,
here
.
Are you interested in collaborating? If so, we would be happy to hear
from you.