Co-Creation in Practice: How Use Cases Drive FAIR Data Solutions with and for the Agricultural Research Community

Despite a broad commitment to Open Science, well-established policies, and growing societal demand for high-quality, openly accessible data, the gap between available research data management (RDM) infrastructures and their actual uptake in agricultural research practice remains substantial. To address this challenge, the FAIRagro initiative follows a co-creation approach, developing FAIR data solutions with and for the agricultural research community, and tailored to the specific requirements of agricultural scientists. Use Cases (UCs) are the central instrument of this co-creative strategy. Rather than being traditional research projects, UCs are selected based on their relevance to both domain-specific scientific questions and clearly articulated RDM challenges. Their development is embedded in a structured and iterative process coordinated by FAIRagro's "Use Case Implementation" Task Area. Comprehensive needs assessments and gap analyses ensure that UCs represent a broad spectrum of research areas and community-driven priorities. In close collaboration with RDM experts, infrastructure providers, and service developers, UC teams co-create, test, and refine solutions that are not only technically robust but also practically applicable and aligned with the workflows and RDM needs of agricultural researchers. Depending on their focus, UCs engage in interdisciplinary working groups that include members from FAIRagro's other Task Areas, such as "Infrastructure and Services" and "Standardization, Interoperability, and Data Quality". These working groups serve as collaborative interfaces where domain-specific requirements directly inform the development of sustainable, FAIR-compliant infrastructures and services. Two current examples illustrate this co-creation process in practice: Data integration workflows for crop model validation Several Use Cases collaborate to design an ETL pipeline that extracts data from heterogeneous sources, including scientific publications, field trials, IoT sensors, and public repositories, and transforms them into standardized input formats for crop models. The pipeline addresses integration, standardization, quality control, and workflow automation within a cloud-based FAIRagro infrastructure. FAIR-compliant publication formats for agrosystem sciences Another group of Use Cases co-develops domain-specific templates using the ARC FAIR digital object format. Guided by data governance experts, these templates are adapted to the structure and semantics of agricultural data, serving both as publication formats and as harmonized standards within the FAIRagro unified data infrastructure. The solutions generated through these Use Cases are implemented within research projects and actively disseminated by the UC teams themselves, supported by FAIRagro's Task Area for "Community Involvement and Networking". This promotes visibility, reuse, and adoption across the broader agricultural research landscape. Ultimately, the Use Case approach contributes to a much-needed cultural shift towards FAIR, sustainable, and collaborative data practices, anchored in co-creation in practice and aligned with the real-world requirements of agricultural science.