National Research Data Infrastructure: Faculty involved

The primary goal of a National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) is to make research data sustainably accessible to the academic world and also usable by third parties. After the Federal Government and the Länder decided in 2018 to establish a National Research Data Infrastructure on the recommendation of the Council for Information Infrastructures, the German Research Foundation (DFG) initiated a call for proposals for the establishment of such an infrastructure. The deadline for submitting full proposals for funding NFDI consortia was mid-October. Faculty 2 is involved in one proposal and the University of Stuttgart in a total of three.

In order to create such a knowledge repository for the entire research landscape, researchers and infrastructure facilities within the NFDI are to form so-called consortia and create binding standards, interoperable services and reliable, easy-to-use and secure infrastructures for their respective specialist communities. This should enable and simplify the handling of research data according to the so-called FAIR principles: FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-Usable.

Different specialist communities define and prioritise these attributes differently. Nevertheless, the common goal is to store high-quality data, make it available for reproduction and reuse, and thus increase and ensure the quality and traceability of research results overall. The aspect of interdisciplinary sustainability of the research data and the standards to be created for processing is another core task of the NFDI.

Researchers of the faculty have participated in an NFDI consortium (NFDI4Ing) together with the competence team for research data (FoKUS) located at the IZUS and the High Performance Computing Centre (HLRS) in the field of engineering sciences. Other partners include RWTH Aachen, TUs Berlin, Darmstadt, Dresden and Munich, KIT, DLR and FZ Jülich. The faculty is represented in the steering committee by Prof. Flemisch.

The funding procedure is not strictly competitive, but focuses primarily on the cooperation of the consortium's projects. It is expected that from 1.10.2020 about 5 to 8 consortia will be funded. The University hopes that the applications with Stuttgart participation will be included in the first round. The Federal Government and the Länder would like to fund up to 30 such consortia. The NFDI will receive up to 70 million euros per year for this purpose. As a rule, each consortium will receive 2 to 5 million euros per year, including a programme lump sum of 22 percent.