Base4NFDI: Fostering A Cross-Disciplinary Service Landscape For The German National Research Data Infrastructure
Creators: name: Zänkert, Sandra
name: Manske, Antje
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2025
Subjects: IDCC25
Lightning Talks
Curation infrastructure: Tools, systems and services that are in development
Curation infrastructure: Evaluations of existing tools and principles in data curation
service development, FAIR data, cross-disciplinary, integration, interoperability
Service development
FAIR data
Cross-disciplinary
Intergration
Interoprability

description: Since March 2023, the NFDI (German National Research Data Infrastructure), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), comprises the final 26 discipline-specific consortia. These consortia cover a wide range of scientific disciplines, from the humanities and social sciences to engineering and the life and natural sciences. They focus on developing or enhancing tools, services, and workflows to enable FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data sharing in their respective disciplines. They also drive cultural change towards an open data culture. This will professionalise RDM in a very diverse landscape of technical and organisational solutions.

Base4NFDI is a joint initiative of all the 26 discipline-specific consortia to develop essential basic services through a proposal-driven, bottom-up process. It aims to ensure overall coherence of emerging basic services from a sociotechnical perspective and streamline their development. In this talk we introduce the project Base4NFDI and examples of the basic services funded. We outline the decision making process and how the development of the services is supported, e.g. with consulting and training. We will discuss the challenges faced in the first two years and provide an outlook on questions regarding interoperability at an international level. Proposals for basic services arise from so-called NFDI sections, where cross-domain topics are addressed beyond disciplinary boundaries of the consortia. The sections combine infrastructural and technological expertise with domain knowledge on topics such as Common Infrastructures, (Meta)data, Terminologies and Provenance, Training and Education, Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects, and Industry Engagement.

Basic services encompass technical-organisational solutions, including storage, computing services, software, processes, workflows, and necessary personnel support, provided. They typically bundle or scale existing services and are characterized by scalability and sustainable operating models, developed during the funding period in Base4NFDI. Basic services have to pass three phases: initialisation, integration, and ramp-up for operation. Each phase requires an application and can only be funded after a rigorous review procedure, assessing whether user needs are met and technical quality and coherence criteria are fulfilled. The development of basic services is supported across all phases by Base4NFDI staff. For example, Section Liaison Officers support the NFDI section in preparing basic service development strategies and Service Stewards ensure smooth interplay between sections, NFDI consortia, and partner organisations involved in service development. A NFDI-wide basic service aims to benefit most or all consortia and their users, significantly enhancing the efficiency of the German research community. The first service candidates under development include an authentication framework, a terminology service, a PID and a Jupyter service. After successfully passing the three phases, basic service candidates will be added to NFDI’s service portfolio. As services mature, questions about KPIs, service quality, models for long-term operation and interoperability will need to be addressed. Particularly at the international level, integration with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) will be a key focus.