NFDI4ING contributed to the FAIR4Instruments Workshop hosted by the TDCC-NES on February 12–13, 2026, in Utrecht. NFDI4ING and the Dutch Thematic Digital Competence Centre (TDCC) for the Natural & Engineering Sciences (NES) share the goal of ensuring that engineering researchers have the competencies, services, and tools required to manage and use data and software in a FAIR manner.
The workshop in Utrecht brought together contributors primarily from Dutch and German institutions to discuss the identification and documentation of research instruments and experimental setups in alignment with the FAIR principles.
Day 1: Perspectives, Solutions, and Challenges
The workshop opened with stakeholder perspectives on funding frameworks, laboratory and software workflows, Open Hardware, and Persistent Identifier (PID) provisioning. These contributions were followed by presentations of existing solutions and use cases. During day 1, NFDI4ING contributed insights into their standards for documenting research data workflows, their metadata profile-based infrastructure, and presented best practice examples and tools regarding digital datasheets for sensors. The contribution ended with an outlook on industrial applications exemplified by the Semantic PEA Data sheet. Day 1 concluded with an exchange on current challenges, particularly regarding interoperability and the standardisation of heterogeneous and complex instrument setups across disciplines.
Day 2: Working Groups and Future Directions
On the second day, participants formed smaller working groups to address key topics, including:
- Case studies for FAIR instruments
- FAIR data for and from instruments
- Data acquisition software
- Ontologies for research instruments
- Infrastructure for instrument data
- Instrument use in publications
- Security and trust in FAIR-aligned scientific instrumentation
The work on these topics in ongoing, but will be consolidated in a white paper to be completed in advance of PIDfest 2026 (October 27–29, 2026, Leiden).
Andreas Noback