Speaker
Description
Creating NFDI-wide basic services in a world of specific domains
NFDI is a German initiative to set up research data infrastructures within all disciplines, covering Humanities and Social Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Sciences and Engineering Sciences. To ensure sustainability, it will integrate national with international activities.
In addition to domain-specific NFDI consortia, Base4NFDI (https://base4nfdi.de/) has been formed. Base4NFDI is a unique joint effort of all NFDI consortia to develop and deploy NFDI-wide basic services. These services will be integrated into the emerging infrastructures at the European level, especially the EOSC. The target group for basic services is the wider NFDI-community and, in particular, operators of community-specific services. The resulting NFDI-wide basic service portfolio will be beneficial for all disciplines.
Decisions on basic services will be made by all consortia in the bodies of the NFDI Association. To generate proposals for basic services, Base4NFDI will draw on the expertise in the NFDI Sections. There exchange between consortia on cross-cutting topics happens. The sections provide infrastructural and technological expertise in combination with domain knowledge and act as incubators for identifying potential basic services. Currently, the following sections exist: ‘Metadata, Terminologies and Provenance’, ‘Common Infrastructures’, ‘Education and Training’, and ‘Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects’ (a further section dedicated to industry engagement is currently being discussed).
Development will commence with a service for Identity and Access Management (IAM). Establishing approved identities and organizationally defined access rights across service providers will be crucial for seamless data management workflows.
For development, Base4NFDI will rely on a three-stage process of 1) initialisation of potential basic services 2) integration of basic services candidates and 3) ramping-up for operation and becoming part of the NFDI basis service portfolio.
The work programme of Base4NFDI is clustered in four Task Areas. Task Areas ‘Service requirements, design and development’ and ‘Service integration and ramping-up for operation’ will accompany and support the basic services within the three phases of the process. Task Area ‘Service coherence processes and monitoring’ will overlook the whole process, and Task Area ‘Project governance’ will manage the project.
MPCDF has a co-leading role in Task Area 2: service integration and ramping-up for operation.
