NFDI Section Common Infrastructures

The section organizes the coordination of the NFDI consortia and other actors for the development of federated infrastructures and software components and is thus also the central point of contact for the development of basic services. In addition to the identification, conception and development of jointly usable infrastructure components and their interoperability, the section has the specific goal of developing a Research Data Commons (RDC) - a commons for research data. The RDC should enable uniform access to data, software and compute resources as well as sovereign data exchange and collaborative work. The RDC concept has become increasingly important internationally for the development of research data infrastructures: Examples include the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), the US National Cancer Institute Research Data Commons (NCI RDC) or the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Another goal is to establish sustainable structures for technology partnerships within the NFDI in order to organize the provision of shared information infrastructures in the long term. In recent years, the section has created a functioning internal organization (despite a lack of funding). The working groups that have been set up (currently 10+1) have largely proved to be very successful; the majority of them are currently working on the preparation and development of basic services. The working groups span the topics data integration, data management planning, data science and artificial intelligence, electronic lab notebooks, identity and access management, infrastructure and data security, long-term archival, multi-cloud, persistent identifiers and research software engineering. Basic services originating from these working groups are IAM4NFDI, PID4NFDI, DMP4NFDI, Jupyter4NFDI and nfdi.software. However, the lack of an architectural concept supported by all consortia proved to be a serious deficit. This was addressed in the section with the creation of a corresponding working group. This will improve the possibility of recognizing deficits and overlaps in the working groups in the future and thus achieve a better focus and division of labour. In addition to providing support for RDC development, the cross-sectional tasks of the section include, above all, those that improve the organizational structure and communication with the working groups, other sections and consortia. The overview and planning of further activities will in future be supported by internal documentation and a knowledge base as well as an outreach strategy to be developed. The section is involved in various initiatives outside the NFDI. Many stakeholders are not only involved in the NFDI, but are also active in other (inter)national networks, standardization initiatives and projects. There are synergies with the ESFRI Landmarks and projects, the GAIA-X project, the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). In particular, the section will support the establishment of the NFDI as an EOSC national node.