International Activities

Goals

Base4NFDI’s international activities are aimed at facilitating collaboration and being open to support to and from other communities, as well as elevating our lessons learned and expertise from our national service infrastructure development and outcomes.

We are happy to partner and work together on international activities. Below is an overview of our activities and where to meet us:

European Open Science Cloud (EOSC):

Interoperability with EOSC is at the heart of Base4NFDI. Therefore, we are frequently adding to our EOSC site, keeping everyone interested posted on our core activities towards EOSC.

Research Data Alliance (RDA):

Our executive manager, Najla Rettberg, is an active member of RDA’s Technical Advisory Board (TAB) which acts as the technical backbone of the RDA, offering expertise and guidance to the Council.
Raphael Ritz, one of our Co-spokesperson (TA2), is an active member of RDA’s Organisational Advisory Board which is, among other tasks, collaborating with the TAB to review midpoint and final Working Group Recommendations and outputs.
Bernhard Miller, one of our Co-spokespersons (TA4), is co-chair of the RDA National Data Services Interest Group which aims to identify common elements across national data services.
Both Co-spokespersons and staff members in Base4NFDI are active in RDA Groups, strengthening international collaboration, e.g. Professionalising Data Stewardship IG, Uptake of Digital Research Infrastructure IG.

Base4NFDI International Advisory Board (IAB):

The Base4NFDI International Advisory Board (IAB) is composed of five international experts who provide strategic advice to Base4NFDI. These highly distinguished experts review the overall status of Base4NFDI and give recommendations for the development and strategic operation.
See all IAB members here.

Strategy

Base4NFDI develops sustainable open science services for the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). These activities have the potential to be visible and adaptable across borders. The Mission of Base4NFDI emphasises the importance to help shape the international open science infrastructure field. Base4NFDI aims to leverage its strengths by connecting to international initiatives to learn from others but also to be visible as well as interoperable with its RDM services.

At a technical level the following is appropriate:

Service catalogues: Ensuring developments with the Base4NFDI service catalogue align with the emerging NFDI EOSC Node catalogue and vice versa.
Technical alignment with existing services and international initiatives and relevance in international projects (EOSC, other E-Infra projects).
API Standardisation: Ensure all Basic Service APIs use widely accepted standards for global interoperability.
Metadata Harmonisation: Adopt international community-agreed metadata schemas (e.g. Dublin Core, schema.org) to facilitate service harvesting and discovery by platforms like the EOSC Marketplace.
Identity & Access Mangement (IAM): Prioritise integration of IAM4NFDI with international academic identity federations (e.g. eduGAIN) to allow seamless access for foreign researchers.

At an organisational level we consider the following aspects relevant:

If a service sees relevance, co-development of a component is accepted, provided and the institutions hosting the service have the relevant agreements in place. Node to node communication at service level is also encouraged, for example the use by SURF of the TS4NFDI service.
Bi-lateral service agreements.