TS4NFDI Service Portal

The importance of FAIR data in research has increased the use of terminologies for semantic annotations of data. Consequently, many terminology services (TSs) have emerged in recent years. This makes it challenging for many knowledge engineers and domain experts to find suitable terminologies and terms to describe concepts of their domains. TS4NFDI addresses these needs by offering a single point of access, enabling users to conveniently discover, compare, and utilize relevant terminologies across existing TSs of relevance for disciplines in the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) [1]. In this regard, the TS4NFDI Service Portal provides an application for configuring the various parameters of the underlying API Gateway [2], [3]. Moreover, the portal offers a variety of features concerning the terminology curation, findability, and accessibility. Concerning the curation, the service portal offers terminology collections, entity sets, and workflows for missing terms. Collections allow users to bundle terminologies related to their specific needs. In an entity set, users can combine multiple entities, such as classes, from different terminologies into a set. For missing terms, a structured, version-controlled development process for ontologies allows contributors to submit coherent and traceable changes. This facilitates transparent maintenance by the curation team and supports automated publication, resulting in openly accessible community-usable resources. The service portal will act as an overarching terminology service GUI across multiple TSs for enhancing findability. Besides, the mentioned curation features demand a convenient way to interact with the terminologies. Therefore, the portal integrates the Terminology Service Suite (TSS), a collection of web widgets that facilitate the integration of TSs into other services [3], [6], providing a rich user experience for interacting with terminologies and entities. In this way, the portal acts as a showcase for the integration of the TSS widgets. Since the service portal targets multiple disciplines, a mapping service [3], [7] will be part of the portal to further enhance concept findability. This enables communities to find equivalent concepts within different disciplines. Furthermore, users will have the capacity to define their mappings and share them with other portal users in the SSSOM standard [8]. The service portal enables users with personalized configuration and customization through integrating IAM4NFDI [5] as the authentication and authorization infrastructure (AAI). The IAM service also enables the service portal to manage access rights to licensed terminologies. It also helps users to access the protected sections through their institution credentials [3]. The data for the mentioned features are maintained in the centralized API Gateway. As collections, entity sets, and mappings are linked with a unique identifier, all subsequent API requests will align with the requirements of the user. This enables the communities to have a well-defined list of terminologies, entity sets, and mappings for their users to query and use. Next to these features, the portal provides documentation, showcases incubator projects from the various communities, and is also the contact point for community projects to state their needs and request to be an incubator [4]. The service provides comprehensive information about existing and supported TSs backends, their content, and their current service status. This can benefit the users by summarizing the existing TSs in one page and also increasing the reach for the target TSs backend to enhance their usage. Overall, the TS4NFDI service portal will be a single access point for various terminology-related activities.