2026-07-30

In July we informed about another of our basic services: Terminology Services 4 NFDI (TS4NFDI). In the summary below you will see what the team has been working on, what is usable already, and where you can find further resources and materials.

TS4NFDI Community Support

Firstly, we would like to highlight the fantastic news that the submission for the TS4NFDI Ramp-Up Phase has been approved by the Consortia Assembly. The service will enter the final phase of the Base4NFDI framework at the start of 2027.
During the Ramp-Up Phase, TS4NFDI will focus on establishing sustainable operational models and integrating its services into the long-term NFDI service portfolio. Activities include consolidating support, maintenance, monitoring, and analytics, while expanding terminology coverage and quality. The project will further promote integration into downstream services, engage with user communities through workshops and events, gather feedback for continuous improvement, and provide training resources.

At the moment, TS4NFDI is in their Integration Phase, which is expected to be completed by the end of the year. The goal of the Integration Phase is to further develop the service into a mature and functional solution that will have been adopted by an initial group of organisations and institutions for their day-to-day operations. TS4NFDI has made significant progress from concept to practical implementation and already provides a range of usable components, documentation, and community resources that support terminology management across the NFDI. 

The increasing adoption of the service within NFDI is demonstrated through its incubator programme. Numerous incubator projects are already completed or currently in progress, supporting the integration of TS4NFDI into services and infrastructures from different consortia. A recent example is the successful integration of TS4NFDI into the RADAR repository and its disciplinary services such as RADAR4Chem, RADAR4Culture, and RADAR4Memory. Researchers can now use standardised terms of terminologies directly when describing datasets, resulting in more consistent metadata and improved interoperability and reusability. The ongoing incubator programme continues to increase the use of terminology services and their features across the NFDI landscape.  

Another important element of TS4NFDI is its community engagement. As you can see in their event calendar, the project regularly organises and participates in workshops, conference sessions, hackathons, and training events that introduce researchers and developers to terminology services and their practical application. These events not only promote awareness of the service but also provide valuable opportunities to collect user feedback and foster collaboration with NFDI consortia. Together with the publicly available documentation, publications, and incubator programme (see above), these activities have helped establish a growing user community and contribute to the increasing dissemination of TS4NFDI throughout the NFDI ecosystem.

TS4NFDI Service Portal

TS4NFDI has made significant progress in establishing a comprehensive terminology service network for the NFDI, with several core components already available to users. The service provides a central Service Portal that offers access to the widgets of the Terminology Service Suite (TSS), an centralised API Gateway, a NFDI-wide Mapping Service, and an overview of all available Terminology Collections (set of terminologies that were created for a specific purpose or context). Together, these components enable researchers and service providers to discover, harmonise, map, and integrate terminologies across disciplines while facilitating the seamless integration of terminology functionalities into third-party applications .

As an important part of its technical infrastructure, TS4NFDI also offers a broad range of supporting resources. Comprehensive documentation is available for all major service components, including the overall architecture, the Service Portal, the TSS, the Mapping Service, and the API Gateway. Developers can access detailed implementation guidance, API documentation, and widget descriptions, making it easier to integrate TS4NFDI functionalities into existing services. In addition, the project maintains a growing collection of publications, presentations, and software resources that document both the scientific background and practical implementation of the service.

To familiarise yourselves with TS4NFDI and its offers, we recommend you watch the following videos:

• TS4NFDI Explainer Video
• Base4NFDI Service Roadshow December 2024
• Base4NFDI Service Roadshow May 2025
• NFDITalk: Terminology Services for NFDI (January 2024)

We hope you enjoy the videos and testing of the offers TS4NFDI already made available to this point. For feedback, questions, or ideas to collaborate, do not hesitate to reach out to the team directly using their contact form.