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Editorial
Dear reader,
after a successful participation at the EGU General Assembly 2024 in mid-April, another major event took place just a month later: this year's NFDI4Earth Plenary in Dresden from 22 to 24 May 2024. With over 120 participants, the Plenary proved to be an active and excellently networked community event. Thank you very much for your coming, inspiring contributions and the fruitful discussions!
Our quaterly newsletter is an information hub based on your contributions. We welcome new contributions to the newsletter anytime. The submission deadline is two weeks before the end of a quarter. For the next newsletter, please send your content before September 15, 2024. For any further information and details please refer to our newsletter information page.
But now enjoy reading!
The NFDI4Earth Newsletter Team
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3rd NFDI4Earth Plenary
BITS - Workshop on Terminologies in Earth System Sciences
NFDI4Earth Academy Workshop on FAIR GPT
NFDI4Earth developed Services: the Living Handbook is taking shape
Workshop on NFDI4Earth Helpdesk: new Experts are invited
Interest Group on High Performance Computing (IG HPC)
Interest Group on Long-term Storage and Archiving (IG LTA)
Spot on... NFDI4Earth
The 2024 Call for Pilots attracts 24 Proposals
Graph-Based Visual Search Engine Calls for Evaluation Participation
Results on the Survey on 'Incentives for FAIR and Open Data Practises'
Participate in NFDI4Earth
NFDI4Earth Data Science Short Course 2024
NFDI4Earth Talk at GeoSaxonia 2024
News from the RDM & Earth System Science Community
Celebrating the Day of the Data 2024 @UBRA
NFDI4Biodiversity Seasonal School on Research Data Management
NFDI4Objects Community Meeting in September 2024 at Mainz
International News
EGU General Assembly 2025: Call for Session Proposals
EOSC Symposium in October 2024 at Berlin
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3rd NFDI4Earth Plenary 2024
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The 3rd NFDI4Earth Plenary took place at the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden from 22 to 24 May 2024. With more than 120 participants from the various disciplines of the Earth System Sciences, the NFDI4Earth proved to be an active and excellently networked community.
The event kicked off on 22 May with numerous side events – from the context of the NFDI4Earth, but also beyond. Of particular note was a workshop on ‘Terminologies in Earth System Sciences’ organised by the German Climate Computing Centre Hamburg and the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology University Library Hannover, as well as an academic ‘speed dating’ event, and a workshop on FAIR GPT for FAIR research data of the NFDI4Earth Academy.
Highlights of the event included impulses on umwelt.info, the central portal for environmental and nature conservation information of the Federal Environment Agency, from the Open Geospatial Consortium on community-driven solutions for geodata as well as from Base4NFDI on cross-disciplinary basic services in the NFDI.
In a broad session of show cases, concrete solutions for FAIR earth system science data, services and tools were presented, including the NFDI4Earth pilot projects. In further workshops, solutions and recommendations developed within the framework of NFDI4Earth were presented and discussed, such as the NFDI4Earth Helpdesk, the NFDI4Earth EduTrain learning portal, the NFDI4Earth Label for repositories, or the NFDI4Earth Openness and FAIRness Commitment as a drivers of cultural change in research data management. A few impressions of the plenary can be found here with a photo gallery.
Please submit your slides, minutes, or posters from the plenary to the NFDI4Earth Zenodo Community to make your contribution sustainable and citable!
The NFDI4Earth Coordination Office (TU Dresden), Christiane Schmidt (GFZ Potsdam) |
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BITS - Workshop on Terminologies in Earth System Sciences
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The BITS project and the NFDI4Earth IG FAIRESST organised two workshops for 'Terminologies in Earth System Science'' as side events of the NFDI4Earth Plenary. The first one focused on “State of the Art and Existing Applications” including an introduction as well as examples for the usage of Ontologies in different scientific domains and was attended by more than 40 participants. The interest was very high from the participants to discuss about this topic. The second part dived into “Gaps and Desired Application”, debating gaps and possible solutions for the implementation of terminologies on different levels and (again) looking beyond the horizon of Earth System Sciences.
During the workshop we used Mentimeter to receive feedback from the audience, whereas the resulting answers suggested the Earth System Science Terminology Service (ESS TS) to be integrated into the NFDI4Earth infrastructure (with an own frontend for the ESS Collection featuring additional applications compared to the central TIB Terminology Service). Participants also reported their challenges with terminologies and services and highlighted desired features for future ESS TS developments.
We would like to thank all the speakers and attendees of our BITS workshops for their participation, the interesting presentations, and the lively discussions. We will continue reporting on our progress in making the Terminology Service for ESS more user-friendly and valuable for the ESS community. If you would like to see the presentations, please visit our Zenodo BITS Community.
The BITS Project Team (DKRZ Hamburg, TIB Hannover, Senckenberg Frankfurt/M.)
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NFDI4Earth Academy Workshop on FAIR GPT
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During its Plenary the NFDI4Earth Academy featured an engaging workshop on the potential of ChatGPT in research data management, attracting around 60 participants.
Jonas Kuppler kicked off the session with an introduction to ChatGPT and prompt engineering fundamentals, setting the stage for Renat Shigapov’s (University of Mannheim) detailed presentation on FAIR GPT. This innovative virtual consultant, integrated within ChatGPT Plus, aims to enhance the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) management of research data.
Renat Shigapov demonstrated practical applications of FAIR GPT in tackling real-world research data challenges, followed by a lively discussion where attendees posed questions and shared comments. The workshop highlighted how advanced AI tools can streamline research data management. For those interested in further exploration, documentation for FAIR GPT is available on GitHub.
Jonas Kuppler (GFZ Potsdam & Geo.X), Effi Drews (FZ Jülich & Geoverbund ABC/J) &
Kristin Sauerland (MARUM & Deutsche Allianz Meeresforschung) with support of ChatGPT
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NFDI4Earth developed Services: the Living Handbook is taking shape
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In the context of the NFDI4Earth Plenary the coordination team of the Living Handbook (LHB) organised a breakout session, where 25 interested participants discussed desired content types, motivation strategies and improvement suggestions. Key points included the need for comprehensive media types, detailed workflow documentation, use of Persistent Identifiers (PID), a better review system and awards for contributions. The participants also emphasized domain-specific content and better integration within the OneStop4All.
We are eager to implement these suggestions and invite researchers, practitioners and enthusiasts to contribute articles or comments. The LHB aims to be a dynamic, encyclopedic resource for NFDI4Earth, research data management, data science and Earth System Sciences. Guidelines for submission are available under the clickable bottom below.
Jie Xu, Dominik C. Hezel (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt / M.), Christiane Schmidt (GFZ, Potsdam)
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Workshop on NFDI4Earth Helpdesk: new Experts are invited
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The first months of operational work of the NFDI4Earth Helpdesk indicated the necessity for a scalable solution to include further expert competence into the NFDI4Earth Helpdesk workflow. A break-out session during the plenary was attributed to improve current workflows.
A major outcome from the discussion and suggestions during the session was to include experts together with their individual community by connecting them as a kind of Expert-Hub. This approach will allow the contribution of individual experts to the NFDI4Earth Helpdesk but without the official institutional commitment. Ideally, this will ensure the solution- and service-oriented workflow necessary to be a successful product within NFDI4Earth.
Klaus Getzlaff (GEOMAR Kiel)
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Interest Group on High Performance Computing (IG HPC)
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The interest group on FAIR data in HPC/ESS met at the plenary 2024 to further discuss its positioning on current challenges in management of data from HPC. In particular, the current trends in the use of artificial intelligence methods, require an integrated approach, taking data sources, data products and re-use of AI-models as services into account. Moreover, along the pilot project CAPICE that has been initiated by the interest group it was identified that future workflows require cross-center access to storage and services, which would require a new way of accounting for the use of resources at more than a single system.
Concerning file formats in ESS a discussion on standards came up, including the topic of metadata integration as attributes to data, like in HDF or NetCDF-formats, but also the quality of GIS format implementations, in particular GeoTIFF, that is used very frequently, was in focus. This event wasn't just an internal meeting for the interest group but also aimed to open up the discourse to the wider community and set the stage for collaborative efforts to address these evolving challenges. The results will be used to update our concept paper.
IG HPC in ESS - Organisers: Stephan Frickenhaus (AWI Bremerhaven) &
Stephan Hachinger (Leibniz-Rechenzentrum Munich)
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Interest Group on Long-term Storage and Archiving (IG LTA)
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The NFDI4Earth Interest Group Long-term Storage and Archiving (IG LTA) organized a community workshop on ‘Digital long-term preservation of ESS data - Challenges and community needs as a side event at the 3rd NFDI4Earth Plenary 2024. The participants representing different stakeholders such as scientists, data stewards, repository providers and governmental agencies discussed the main challenges regarding long-term preservation of relevant ESS data, possible solutions and approaches as well as community needs for an improved RDM support on digital long-term preservation and archiving of ESS data.
Based on the feedback in the community workshop, we identified three main challenges - the lack of easily accessible and understandable information, educational materials and guidelines on digital long-term preservation, the lack of clear allocation of responsibilities for long-term preservation as well as the lack of sustainable financial concepts for long-term curation and preservation of ESS data. Regarding the role of the NFDI4Earth moving forward the workshop participants came to the consensus to keep focusing on the creation and provision of information and educational materials on specific aspects of long-term preservation, but also function as an initiator for a cultural change moving towards a more sustainable data culture taking the requirements of long-term preservation and archiving into account.
IG LTA - Organisers: Peter Valena (Staatliche Archive Bayerns München) &
Tim Schürmann (Bundesamt für Kartographie und Geodäsie Frankfurt/M.)
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The 2024 Call for Pilots attracts 24 Proposals
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The 3rd Pilot Call closed on 23 June 2024 with a remarkable participation of 24 proposals, representing 18 Universities and eleven research institutes. The submissions spanned a wide range of methods and topics of improving research data management in the Earth System Sciences, e. g. data curation, FAIR Big data and its data publications, and offer solutions across various fields of Earth System Sciences. Many thanks to all applicants for their commitment!
The proposals now undergo a review process by expert reviewers. We aim to select five pilot projects to showcase broad-ranging, applicable solutions. The official selection of pilots will be announced at the beginning of August, and the official start of the projects will be in October 2024.
Kolja Nenoff (Universität Leipzig)
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Graph-Based Visual Search Engine Calls for Evaluation Participation
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For a NFDI4Earth Pilot project, the Institute of Software Technologies at German Aerospace Center (DLR) has developed the Graph-Based Visual Search Engine. This tool combines visualization dashboarding and knowledge graph technology to improve the findability of scientific datasets in data repositories. In the current version, the metadata from two diverse repositories (PANGAEA and DLR Earth Observation) are merged to form a knowledge graph, and the web dashboard presents results using various metadata dimensions. The frontend dashboard maps keywords, authors, temporal, and geographical attributes to word clouds, chord diagrams, temporal charts, and maps respectively, providing users with a comprehensive overview and concurrent filtering capabilities.
We invite you to explore this application at vesa.webapps.nfdi4earth.de and share your feedback via our online survey here: Evaluation of Graph Based Visual Search Engine. Your insights and opinions are crucial for refining and enhancing the tool to better meet community needs, and your participation will significantly contribute to the evolution of this tool - the survey is open until 25 August 2024!
For any further information about the tool please directly contact pawandeep.kaur-betz@dlr.de.
Pawandeep Kaur-Betz (DLR, Braunschweig)
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Results of the Online Survey on 'Incentives for FAIR and Open Data Practices'
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The report on the results of the online survey on 'Incentives for FAIR and open data practices' has been published. The survey aimed to better understand the current attitudes and practices of researchers in the German Earth System Sciences community towards the principles of fairness and openness in research data management. This report sheds light on the perspectives and experiences of researchers in relation to FAIR and open research data practices. Participants were asked about existing practices, challenges, and opportunities associated with FAIR and open data practices in general and with the sharing of research data in particular.
The survey was open for participation from October to mid-December 2023 and is part of the work in the measure M4.2 'Towards a Cultural Change in Earth System Sciences Research Data Management' of the NFDI4Earth.
Learn more about the results of the report published as a NFDI4Earth Zenodo publication.
Andreas Hübner (Freie Universität Berlin)
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Participate in NFDI4Earth
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NFDI4Earth Data Science Short Course 2024
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The Institute for Geosciences at Goethe University Frankfurt offers a short course of the German Mineralogical Society entitled: Data Science Short course. The course is relevant for everyone interested to gain skills in this future topic. It features a mix of a Python Course, programming of web-applications and presentations by various researchers on a wide range of topics related to data science, modeling and research data management. There is an online part on 11, 13 and 16 September stronger focused on Python and a presence part on 18 to 20 September 2024 in Frankfurt.
You will find more information about the course incl. the announcement and current updates here.
Dominik C. Hezel (Goethe Universität Frankfurt / M.)
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NFDI4Earth Talk at GeoSaxonia 2024
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The annual meeting of the German Geological Society (DGGV) GeoSaxonia 2024, focuses on 'Geosciences Without Borders' and brings together geoscientists from Europe and worldwide to convene for a dynamic exchange of knowledge. The event will be held in Dresden from 23 to 26 September 2024. |
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GeoSaxonia 2024 features diverse plenary and keynote lectures, poster sessions, exhibitions, field trips, all aiming to foster interdisciplinary collaborations. NFDI4Earth is excited to highlight our participation in two sessions: Session 13 Managing the Future of Earth Sciences: Data, Citizen Science, Education, Outreach and Session 14 Data Science to learn state-of-the-art methods in Research Data Management.
Both sessions will explore state-of-the-art methods in Research Data Management and Education, address how research data infrastructures can meet today's and future needs of the geosciences, and discuss how to break down borders with Open Science practices and initiatives.
We look forward to meeting you at the event!
Christiane Schmidt & Valentina Protopopova-Kakar (GFZ Potsdam)
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News from the RDM & Earth System Science Community
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Celebrating the Day of the Data 2024 @UBRA
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On 18 June, the U Bremen Research Alliance (UBRA) organised the 2nd Research Data Day at Bremen, themed 'Storing and using research data. Responsibly. Together.' This event provided extensive insights into best practices and the current challenges associated with research data management. Researchers and experts from various disciplines gathered to exchange valuable experiences and discuss opportunities for optimising data practices.
Members of NFDI4Earth actively participated in the event, contributing to the World Café and presenting a poster that highlighted their efforts within the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) initiative. They also held a meet and greet with Prof. York Sure-Vetter fostering further collaboration and knowledge sharing.
A notable highlight was the evening session, featuring esteemed speakers and the presentation of the Data Champion Award 2024. This year, the award was handed to Dr. Norbert Riefler from the Leibniz-IWT (Leibniz Institute for Materials Engineering), recognising his dedication to research data management. If you are interested in participating in the event next year, have a look at the event programme on the UBRA website.
The workshop materials summarizing the workshops held on that day are available at Zenodo.
Christiane Schmidt (GFZ Potsdam), Ira Gerloff (LIAG Hannover)
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NFDI4Objects Community meeting in September 2024 at Mainz
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The second NFDI4Objects Community Meeting will take place from 25 to 27 September 2024 at the Leibniz Center for Archaeology and Mainz University of Applied Sciences. NFDI4Objects is dedicated to managing and utilising research data related to physical objects offering innovative solutions and best practices to the community.
The meeting will feature relevant presentations on the consortium's progress, engaging talks and discussions on current trends, hands-on workshops and training courses for scientists, a poster session, and networking opportunities. This event provides an excellent opportunity to connect with peers, share knowledge and stay updated on the latest developments in object-based data and research data management.
Further information can be found at programme details - registrations are possible here.
Christiane Schmidt (GFZ Potsdam), Tamina Grasme (NFDI4Objects)
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NFDI4Biodiversity Seasonal School on Research Data Management
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The second NFDI4Biodiversity Seasonal School on Data Management in Biodiversity and Environmental Science will take place in collaboration with the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig. This five-day online course running from 2 to 6 December 2024 is designed for early career researchers and covers the entire data life cycle - from planning and data collection to quality control, visualisation and publication.
The course is free of charge - for further details and to register, please visit the website.
Christiane Schmidt (GFZ Potsdam)
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Call for Session Proposals: EGU General Assembly 2025
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The European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly 2025 will bring together geoscientists from around the world to discuss all disciplines of Earth, planetary, and space sciences. Scheduled for 27 April to 2 May 2025 in Vienna, Austria, and online, this event aims to provide a dynamic forum where scientists, especially early career researchers, can present their work and engage with experts across various fields of geoscience.
One of the key highlights for the upcoming assembly is the call for new session proposals. This is a fantastic opportunity for early career researchers & researchers to shape the programme and share their innovative ideas with the scientific community. The public call for session proposals, including short courses and union symposia, is open from 1 July to 9 September 2024.
For more information on the EGU General Assembly 2025 and submission guidelines, please visit the EGU 2025 website.
Christiane Schmidt (GFZ Potsdam)
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EOSC Symposium in October 2024 at Berlin
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The EOSC Symposium 2024 will be held in Berlin from 21 to 23 October. Organised by the EOSC Association in partnership with EOSC Focus, this key event will shape the future of EOSC beyond 2027. Building on the success of the 2023 symposium organised by EOSC Future, the 2024 event aims to expand on-site participation. The German Minister for Education and Research, Bettina Stark-Watzinger, will patronise the symposium.
The event is organised in collaboration with the EOSC-A German Mandated Organisation and NFDI, fostering synergies between the EOSC and NFDI communities. Following the symposium, NFDI will host a meeting with representatives from its 26 consortia to encourage collaboration among the target groups. Among these NFDI4Earth participants are invited to actively participate in the meeting. The preliminary program with lots of networking opportunities can be found online, and registration is possible until 30th of September.
Christiane Schmidt (GFZ Potsdam)
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The NFDI4Earth project has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the project NFDI4Earth (DFG project no. 460036893, https://nfdi4earth.de/) within the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI, https://www.nfdi.de/). |
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NFDI Consortium Earth System Sciences | https://nfdi4earth.de
edited by: Dr. Christiane Schmidt (Helmholtz Centre Potsdam - GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences) & NFDI4Earth Coordination Office (Technische Universität Dresden)
Report news to: nfdi4earth-news@tu-dresden.de
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