Building Bridges through Metadata within the NFDI

The NFDI Task Force Metadata is coordinating a national effort to harmonize research data descriptions across disciplines. Guided by the NFDI 2025/26 strategy and federal mandates, it assessed existing generic schemas—DataCite, DCAT, and Schema.org—rather than creating a new standard. Two 2025 workshops with representatives from nearly all 26 NFDI consortia confirmed these schemas can provide a shared core of essential metadata fields, while allowing domain-specific extensions. Building on this consensus, the Task Force is drafting the NFDI Metadata Standard Recommendations, detailing a core metadata profile, crosswalks and mappings, and best practices for schema extensions to enable interoperability and long-term reuse of research data across the German research landscape.