Author: Thorsten Schwetje

The international online journal ing.grid is now accepting submissions addressing FAIR data management in engineering sciences. With an open access policy, the journal bridges a gap in the field, offering a platform and recognition for sound scientific practice in generating research data, developing reusable tools for processing that data and curating the data to make it findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR).

Getting and staying in touch with the community is the essence of NFDI4Ing. That’s why the consortium offers a broad variety of exchange formats like community meetings, conferences, and workshops. To meet the needs of the community, we continuously work to improve our engagement processes.

It was a close contest, but in the end two nominees prevailed in the NFDI4Ing Awards 2022 against 41 other contributors. We happily congratulate the winners, Wendy (Pengyin) Shan from the University of Alberta Library in Canada, and Rory Macneil from Edinburgh, Scotland. The awards were endowed with 500€ each, sponsored by the WZL Aachen Stiftung.

Virtually all scientific output is communicated through text publications, only suitable for humans and precluding searches beyond simple text matching. By contrast, SciMesh disseminates results as machine-actionable, comprehensive knowledge graphs.

The NFDI4Ing Task Area DORIS designs transferable research-data management concepts and tools for data from high-performance measurement and computation (HPMC), enables, and supports the community to apply these solutions. In order to standardize and facilitate RDM for our peer group, we provide support for the complete data life cycle.

Manual development and maintenance of ontologies are tedious tasks and require extra training to use ontology modelling tools. Therefore, a semi-automatic process to enrich ontologies can assist domain experts, who are not necessarily ontology experts, to map knowledge into ontologies. OntoHuman pursues a Human-in-the-Loop (HiL) approach to address this, which requires humans to provide feedback to an automated system for information extraction from technical documents.

In recent years, concepts, tools and services have been developed that enable good research data management. However, in most disciplines there are not yet any established standards. See how we want to solve this issue for the community.

The workgroup Identity and Access Management finished a first analysis of requirements towards authentication and authorization infrastructures and proposed an AAI architecture for the whole NFDI. Results are available on the continuously updated documentation website.