base services

In the task area base services, all basic RDM services are bundled – both existing and those in development. As such, it provides central services for the research archetype task areas in order to address the archetype-specific requirements. In the same spirit, it develops and maintains services considered as relevant by the Community Clusters. The base services are designed to both deal with the strong interdependencies between different measures and to foster a development mentality focussed on interlocking and consolidating efforts between the partners. Each measure is worked on by multiple partner institutions with a defined lead. Each staff member of the task area participates in at least two measures to support and further develop a holistic view on the service portfolio.

key objectives

NFDI4Ing builds all of its services in a modular and user-centred style. The basic services are delivered by this task area, while the archetype-specific task areas build upon these services their differentiated services tailored to their respective methodological demands from the engineering communities. In the other direction, the RDM implementations in the archetype task areas serve as prototypes for the base services according to our user-centred approach. We have identified seven service objectives relevant for all engineering archetypes and communities and thus for NFDI4Ing’s overarching key objectives:

All archetypes and communities rely on data quality assurance processes, the respective tools, and data quality metrics to make their data FAIR and to enable engineers to appraise and select data for further curation (measure S-1);
the support of research software development is by now urgent in all fields of engineering, particularly but not only in computational engineering (measure S-2);
providing easy-to-use yet comprehensible metadata tools for the engineering research daily routine as well as establishing detailed terminologies for engineering are the common ground for all RDM processes (measure S-3);
the safe and secure storage and long-term archiving of data as well as the possibility to share or publish data in suitable repositories is relevant to all archetypes and communities, yet in different shape (measure S-4);
all archetype services participate in NFDI4Ing’s overall software architecture incl. authentication, authorisation, and role management schemes, absolutely necessary for confident data from research projects close to industry (measure S-5);
concepts and materials for training are needed in all task areas (measure S-6);
most of the outcomes of engineering research is still hidden in human-readable publications only. Making engineering data FAIR needs advanced techniques of data extraction from and knowledge discovery in the engineering literature (measure S-7).

All services are designed as open, modular, and standardised as possible, in order to foster crossconsortial reusability. Furthermore, we strive for technical and structural connectivity to parallel and prospective developments in RDM on the national and international level (e.g. in the EOSC).