Author: Anja Busch

What do linguistics, medicine and environmental science have in common? GeRDI! On May 16, 2019 GeRDI hosted a second Community Workshop at DFN in Berlin. Once again researcher from different disciplines as well as infrastructure provider met and discussed the current developments of the GeRDI prototype. In particular, four topics were tackled and clarified via use cases of the represented scientists:

1. Data Workflows and Data Pipelines

2. Disciplinary Metadata

3. Submit Service Design

4. Data Quality

The researchers’ feedback is being used for future developments. We would like to thank all participants, who spent the day with us, shared their use cases with us and provided us with new and valuable insights. The discussions have shown that research data management across disciplines is becoming increasingly important and that suitable solutions are needed.

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The advent of data intensive science has fueled the generation of digital scientific data. Undoubtedly, digital research data plays a pivotal role in transparency and re-producibility of scientific results as well as in steering the innovation in a research process. However, the main challenges for science policy and infrastructure projects are to develop practices and solutions for research data management which in compliance with good scientific standards make the research data discoverable, citeble and accessible for society potential reuse.

Read more how GeRDI targets long tail content that stems from research communities belonging to different domain and research practices.

The GO FAIR initiative serves as a hub for exchange on research data management and its FAIR design. GeRDI is also involved as one Implementation Network. As project, it will offer generic, sustainable and open software connecting research data repositories to enable multidisciplinary research data management. This software will be based on common standards.
In this video, Monika Linne, scientific advisor at the GO FAIR office, explains the initiative’s fields of action and how the various actors come into contact in order to implement the FAIR principles.

What does the digital revolution means for science and research? Prof. Dr. Klaus Tochtermann, Director of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics and member of the Council for Information Infrastructures, talks about Open Science and explains the major trends in science policy.

GeRDI regards itself as one contribution to the shaping of digital change in science. In the field of research data management, the project aims at making scientific information findable, accessible and reusable.

The Semantic Web in Libraries Conference, jointly organized by the ZBW and HBZ, this year took place from 26 to 28 November in Bonn. One of the key threads of the conference was the role of metadata. The available structured (meta)data and services that rely on metadata is increasing. In this context, metadata could provide even more support, such as in exploring/understanding data collections, archives, datasets, etc., which are especially important for research data infrastructure initiatives.

The “Research infrastructure” theme of the conference included talks on the application of Semantic Web technologies for developing services that use different resource types, such as research publications, data, links between them, software, programming languages, etc. This is something that we in GeRDI also consider. For more information (themes, presentations, contact information, etc.), please visit the official website of the SWIB18 conference.

Dr. Stephan Hachinger from our community partner AlpenDAC reported on RDM services and related activities at LMU, TU and LRZ at the RDA interest group for “Research Architectures in Research Institutions” (RDARI). The collaboration presented in Gaborone was initially started by local stakeholders of the GeRDI project (researchers, librarians and ICT specialists). In his talk he sketched the efforts to coordinate the services from archival and backup at the computing centre to the support of users by data specialists at the libraries. The inclusion of a broad variety of stakeholders with a clear focus on provision of services for scientists is one of the exciting facets of GeRDI.

For more information please visit: https://www.rd-alliance.org/ig-research-data-architectures-research-institutions-rda-12th-plenary-meeting

Tobias Weber, a member of our software development team, explained in his talk at the International Data Week in Gaborone, how to upgrade a data silo to become a FAIR repository. Since GeRDI is also a GO FAIR implementation network, the presented reference architecture allows data management solutions to become GeRDI-compliant. The advocate of loosely-coupled microservices and open source software went into detail how this architecture has been designed based on the requirements of several communities which are also partners in GeRDI (e.g. VerbaAlpina).

For more information please visit: https://www.scidatacon.org/IDW2018/sessions/267/paper/591/

The RDA interest group “repository platforms for research data” aims on improving the usability and technical capabilities of repository platforms. GeRDI project member Ralph Müller-Pfefferkorn (TU Dresden) is one of its co-chairs. At the Twelfth RDA Plenary Meeting in Gaborone, Botswana the group discussed two topics: direct access to data in repositories for data analysis and enforcing data policies in repositories. The goal is to found working groups for these topics. Read More

The GeRDI Project has formed an Implementation Network (IN) under the GO FAIR initative and offers to exchange experiences in interdisciplinary metadata services, based on community requirements, plus designing and implementing a resulting system architecture. Projects and initiatives are invited to join the IN, especially those also possessing experiences regarding operational models as well as ethical/legal aspects of research data management.

For further information on GO FAIR please visit: www.go-fair.org