NFDI4DS Portal: A General Access Point to NFDI Resources

NFDI4DataScience (NFDI4DS) is a consortium that supports researchers at all stages of the research data lifecycle (collect/create, process, analyze, preserve, access and reuse) to conduct their research to foster FAIR and open research. The developed infrastructure targets researchers from a wide range of disciplines that use data science and AI methods. In this abstract, we present the idea of the 4DS Portal, the main entry point for NFDI4DS. The system allows to navigate digital research artifacts (articles, data, models, workflows, scripts/code) from various scholarly repositories spanning domain-specific ones provided by NFDI consortia such as NOMAD or Repo4Cat and general-purpose ones storing digital artifacts from NFDI such as Zenodo or GitLab. The 4DS Portal provides a rich and intuitive interface for searching and exploring digital artifacts available in the repositories. The 4DS Portal is based on Piveau, a data management ecosystem that proved its scalability in the public sector, forming, for instance, the basis of data.europa.eu. A flexible harvesting module (Piveau Consus) allows for easy development of various harvesters, each consisting of three reusable and adaptable components - an importer, a transformer and an exporter. Internally, metadata information is mapped to DCAT-AP, serving as the underlying metadata schema. The portal provides a SPARQL endpoint for information retrieval and numerous APIs. As a proof-of-concept, several domain-specific repositories provided by NFDI consortia were integrated into the 4DS Portal, including NOMAD (FAIRmat), Repo4Cat (NFDI4Cat), RADAR4Chem (NFDI4Chem) and Chemotion (NFDI4Chem). These domain-specific repositories mainly store datasets originating from the respective communities. Apart from that, several general-purpose repositories storing digital artifacts from NFDI consortia were harvested. Publications from the different Zenodo NFDI communities, source code from the GitHub and GitLab NFDI communities, and videos from the YouTube NFDI communities. Transparency and reproducibility will be facilitated by a further stepwise integration of existing and newly developed services into the overall system. Domain-specific and artifact-specific aspects will continuously be taken into account, especially with regard to metadata extensions. A metadata quality assessment service will complement the portal, to check criteria such as 'use of non-proprietary data formats' or 'availability of license information'. The 4DS Portal has the potential to become an integral part of NFDI as a whole and a future EOSC national node, which exposes all NFDI repositories and all NFDI digital artifacts to the community. With this abstract, we want to engage with the NFDI community and understand the needs and challenges of the different consortia. Therefore, we will discuss the currently developed prototype and outline our plans for future development steps.