The Data Literacy Alliance (DALIA)
Data literacy for all from the very beginning! DALIA is a knowledge base for teaching and learning materials to support cultural change and competence development in the FAIR supply and use of research data. It also serves as a federated knowledge base of the NFDI section “Training and Education”.
Details & Specifications
DALIA collects learning materials, preferably open educational resources (OER), regarding research data management (RDM) and data literacy for learners and lecturers. At the moment such material is spread via various repositories and a central registry is missing. This gap is now filled by DALIA.
Since all disciplines have a need for RDM teaching and learning material, a centralized platform brings the change of reducing double work and reuse material, as not every material is discipline specific. Overall, we want to provide material for all disciplines, career stages and RDM knowledge levels.
Our metadata schema, the DALIA interchange format (DIF), defines and standardizes the metadata via picklists (if applicable) to ensure findability of the resources. Besides a basic search mode DALIA also offers various filter options and an advanced search mode.
The metadata field community allows to find all learning material by a community e.g. NFDI4Chem or NFDI4ING.
DALIA is a section service for the entire NFDI and is responsible for all consortia. The foundation for DALIA was laid by NFDI4Chem, NFDI4ING, NFDI4Culture and NFDI4Health.
Terms of use & restrictions
The use of the DALIA search portal is free of charge. Searching for learning material does not require any login. Further functionalities are only available after login. We provide user login via IAM4NFDI.
DALIA is primarily a registry for learning material regarding data literacy which is deposited in repositories. We do not provide the option to upload the material directly in DALIA.
Terms of use: https://search.dalia.education/en/terms
Contact
contact@dalia.education
For general questions on NFDI4ING or RDM feel free to contact our helpdesk!
References
Publications referencing and/or describing the m4i ontology:
- Hoffmann, A., Ortmeyer, J., Fink, F., Hoyt, C. T., Geiger, J. D., Kehrein, P., Schrade, T. & Herres-Pawlis, S. (2025). Teaching RDM in a smart advanced inorganic lab course and its provision in the DALIA platform. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18902
- Geiger, J., Steiner, P., Desouki, A. A., Hüppe, H. M., & Lange, F. (2026). DALIA Interchange Format (1.4). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17871138
Miscellaneous and further reading:
Video (Deutsch): DALIA, Datenkompetenz einfach erklärt
Video (English): DALIA, Data Literacy made simple