2024-04-15
Base4NFDI is delighted to announce that all proposals submitted this February in Round 4 – Jupyter4NFDI, DMP4NFDI, and KGI4NFDI – have been accepted for funding of the initialisation phase following the Consortia Assembly’s decision!
This marks a growth in the NFDI’s initiative to build basic services for consortia and demonstrates a step forward in the efforts to create RDM-enabling services from across the German research landscape.
Jupyter4NFDI will aim for a central JupyterHub providing access to various software stacks and computing resources across the NFDI consortia.
DMP4NFDI will provide tool hosting for data management plans, template standardisation, support and training for NFDI consortia.
KGI4NFDI will be a service hub to help consortia, institutions and researchers create and link knowledge graphs to ensure interoperability within the NFDI and beyond.
Congratulations to all basic service teams!
With the three new basic service entries, we are one step closer to facilitating an open science landscape and “OneNFDI”.
We are looking forward to what's ahead of us and encourage the NFDI community to join this endeavour by actively participating in the NFDI sections!
2024-04-12
Dear colleagues in the NFDI and beyond,as many of you already know, the first Base4NFDI User Conference (UC4B) will take place in Berlin on November 20/21, 2024.We cordially invite you to contribute to the conference program with this call.Please feel free to distribute the call in your sections, consortia, basic service teams and other relevant groups.
Further information can be found on the event website.
If you have any questions, please contact
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Call for Contributions
Today, research data is often stored in many different places, difficult to find and only available for a limited time. The NFDI aims towards better findability, accessibility and reusability of research data. Base4NFDI integrates and establishes basic services as common, interoperable solutions. Already existing services are adapted or extended to be usable for researchers from other disciplines. This way, parallel developments are avoided - since many scientific fields have similar requirements for a number of research data management services.
The Base4NFDI User Conference is set up to become the focal point in the development of Basic Services in NFDI. It is used to present, discuss and operationalize current developments in the Basic Services funded via Base4NFDI as well as potential future Basic Services. The User conference programme welcomes participation from the NFDI community and beyond.
Members from sections and its working groups, consortia, Basic Services and beyond are invited to contribute to the discussion and participate in the event, with the long term goal of collaboratively shaping the service offering Base4NFDI can provide to both NFDI and the wider RDM landscape.
For that reason we ask to submit abstracts to demonstrate activities around Base4NFDI services.
Possible topics for abstracts:
Formalities:
We request abstracts of a maximum of 500 words. Please use the template linked at the event page for submission. Please submit the abstract here by May 15, 2024:
https://events.gwdg.de/event/658/abstracts/
The review will be done in collaboration with the NFDI sections, the Base4NFDI Basic Services teams and the Base4NFDI staff, the decision will be made by the program chairs.
Accepted abstracts will either get a slot for
At least one person from each submission is expected to attend the conference. Virtual participation is not possible. Abstracts and slides/posters will be published on Zenodo after the conference. Accepted abstracts may be revised before publication.
Further details can be found here.
The Program Chairs,
Reinhard Altenhöner, Raphael Ritz, Sonja Schimmler
2024-03-21
Great news for our community: Base4NFDI is now on LinkedIn!
We're excited to share latest news and updates from the world of Basic Services in the NFDI-Community.
Discover inspiring events and read about important milestones from Base4NFDI and NFDI research disciplines but more importantly: connect with us, the NFDI-Consortia and Basic Service Development Teams.
We’re looking forward to meeting you, expanding our network and engaging with you.
#Base4NFDI #NFDI #ResearchSoftware #DataManagement
2024-03-15
Base4NFDI supports its funded services to understand their target group by developing Personas - now you can use the workshop materials and template too! Click here to find our Persona Creation Kit.
Have you ever struggled to understand your service's target group? A lot of time and effort went into development of a service but now many of your potential users are not aware of the service, don’t get its benefits or are struggling to use it?
Personas are archetypes - fictional characters - that represent typical users. They help designers and developers of services efficiently identify and empathize with user needs, characteristics, and goals.
In Base4NFDI we fund and support the creation of basic services that are potentially relevant to all consortia – and thereby different scientific disciplines. Basic services are technical-organizational solutions that may include storage and computing services, software and workflows as well as personnel support and are scalable, sustainable and effective.
In the requirements analysis phase, we support basic service teams with workshops and introduce methods to gather personas, epics and user stories to enable a user-centric design that fits the needs of the scientific community. One of these measures were two persona creation workshops in November 2023 and February 2024 where the first 6 personas were created by Base4NFDI-funded projects.
You want to develop personas but do not have a basic service proposal (yet)? We derived the Base4NFDI Persona Creation Kit from the workshops we did and published it on Zenodo. So, if you are interested, go ahead, learn about the process, see some examples or gather people from your team and develop your own personas.
Image credit: pch.vector on Freepik
2024-02-28
The RDA Deutschland Tagung 2024 took place 20/21 February at the GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam (GFZ). The RDA DE Association, in cooperation with the State and Library University Göttingen (SUB) and the Helmholtz Open Science Office, organised a versatile event, including two interesting keynotes and a number of talks covering a broad range of different topics. Furthermore, projects and initiatives were given the opportunity to present their work during a poster session. Base4NFDI was represented with two posters: An introduction to Base4NFDI , and another poster specifically dedicated to our Section Liaison Officers and Service Stewards .
Due to the pandemic, this year’s RDA DE Tagung was the first in-person since 2020. The event was framed by an opening keynote “Die Eckpunkte der europäischen Datenstrategie” given by Renate Nikolay, and the closing keynote “Who owns your data? Who should benefit from it? The effect of UN policy decision on biological data management” by Dr. Amber Hartman Scholz. Both keynotes drew attention to the multiple challenges that data collecting, storing, and reuse have on several levels, primarily focussing their talks on ethical issues.
The variety of talks, spanning from repositories and archives, RDA’s current strategic plan to digital emergency preservation, invited the audience to lively discuss each topic and served as a formidable basis for in-between conversations over a coffee and during the poster session. Each poster was briefly introduced in a ‘Minute Madness’ where the authors could advertise their work. While our introductory poster to B4N attracted people who were interested in which basic services they could potential use for their own work – both within and outside NFDI consortia –, our poster about the Service Stewards and Section Liaison Officers raised questions about how which support a basic service team can expect from those two groups of staff and how their expertise can best be utilised for cooperation between the different stakeholders.
For our work in B4N, the RDA Deutschland Tagung was an interesting and useful insight into an active and intrinsically motivated community whose activities and outputs will continue to play a major role globally. We are looking forward to strengthening our bonds with the RDA and overall international players.
Our Base4NFDI team at RDA Deutschland Tagung 2024.
2024-02-23
Base4NFDI is excited to announce the release of version 3.0 of our proposal template for the Initialisation Phase - the first of three phases for Basic Service candidates. The new version is now available for download here and on the Base4NFDI templates page.
Please use this template for the upcoming rounds!
Changes:
This update is a result of valuable feedback gathered from various proposal teams and NFDI Consortia, coupled with insights gained from our experiences within Base4NFDI. Our aim is to streamline
processes and enhance clarity. Our commitment to refining templates is an ongoing endeavor, and we encourage you to share your suggestions with Task Area 3 by reaching out to
2024-01-25
Base4NFDI in a Nutshell: Base4NFDI is an initiative to create common and shared services for the NFDI community. The goal is to underpin the activities within the NFDI disciplinary consortia by providing efficient NFDI-wide core services to support research data sharing. One of the main focus areas is to provide a sustainable framework in which to roll out generic services as well as a coherent service landscape. These services will grow, evolve and become permanent features of the NFDI landscape.
Three building blocks of development: Base4NFDI supports new services getting off the ground via a programme of financial support. Each service goes through three separate project phases: initialization, implementation and roll-out, during which all the NFDI consortia will have the opportunity to iteratively decide whether to support each service in the next stage. This will ensure basic data sharing needs of the consortia are met and guarantees a commitment to use the service.
Base4NFDI encourages potential services to integrate and adapt already existing component parts of the German research service landscape, as well as ensuring interoperability and connectivity with infrastructures outside of Germany, for example EOSC. Monitoring and refinement of the services through user feedback will be consistently developed and realized. Meanwhile, the Base4NFDI staff supports and consults with regards to all topics from requirement engineering to communication & training in each of the three service stages.
The team is growing:
1. We now have a new managing director, Najla Rettberg, who is based at TU Dresden. You can get in touch directly with her via email (
2. Support for implementation: We are also pleased to launch our Service Steward programme. We now have four dedicated stewards whose remit is to accompany the services over their three stages and give relevant support for adoption and service integration. See who they are here.
3. An ear to the ground: At the same time, Base4NFDI is committed to keeping up to date with the Section activities and outputs, where ideas for potential services will derive from. It does this via three Section Liaisons who are now in place to become embedded in Section meetings and fully understand the potential for new services. See their names here.
How can you contact the Base4NFDI team? Send an email to the Office (
Base4NFDI is community-driven – we are here for you to work together to co-design these basic services for the whole of NFDI. We are happy to listen and hear your ideas. We welcome your involvement!
Propose to us! If you are preparing for one of the next rounds (deadlines 15 February - 1 May - 1 August), feel free to reach out to us directly at
More information:
B
ase is transparent: You can see all abstracts of projects who applied in 2023 here. The three projects in the initialization and integration phase are here. Each of the ongoing projects will be presented regularly at the NFDI talks - stay tuned for the schedule. Remember to keep an eye out for our list of events.
Up and running projects: More information about the individual projects: you can read them here on the Base4NFDI website. You can view the abstracts in our
Zenodo community
2023-12-20
We’re happy to announce the first Base4NFDI User Conference on 20 and 21 November 2024 in Berlin!
Our invitation goes out to everyone interested in actively using & shaping future basic services of the NFDI. The conference will be a place to talk about requirements, exchange ideas with the communities and to get to know the current developments in detail. We will provide updates on the conference on our website base4nfdi.de soon.
Our best wishes to everyone for the holidays and a happy new year.
2023-12-06
Mark your calendars! The deadlines for submitting the basic service applications for rounds 5 and 6 needed to be adjusted due to fixed consortium assembly meeting dates and the required time for the decision-making process:
Round 5: May 1st, 2024 - previous: May 15th, 2024
Round 6: August 1st, 2024 - previous: September 15th, 2024
2023-12-06
A new version of the Base4NFDI proposal has been published on Zenodo. This version reflects the funding cuts, milestones/deliverables, and the updated term of the project (01/03/2023 to 29/02/2028).
https://zenodo.org/records/10245518
2023-11-20
We are delighted to announce IAM4NFDI's entry into the Integration phase in early 2024, following the Consortia Assembly’s meeting in the third round.
The basic service
IAM4NFDI
connects and expands current and existing identity access management systems with the goal to access digital resources NFDI-wide and beyond. IAM4NFDI aims to become a decentralised, federated IAM (Identity and Access Management) for approx. 5000 home institutions.
The integration phase centres on the (further) development of the service, its testing and introduction as a prototype. In order to ensure the connection of as many use cases as possible within NFDI, the service will be harmonised with existing solutions.
Congratulations to the basic service project team!
2023-09-11
One aim of Base4NFDI is to provide a basis for better findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability of research data. This also includes the publication of data. For this purpose, we have moved the Base4NFDI Proposal to Zenodo for better a find- and reusability. Take a look.
Bernard, Lars, Altenhöner, Reinhard, Böhm, Franziska, Diepenbroek, Michael, Ebert, Barbara, Fluck, Juliane, Herres-Pawlis, Sonja, Klinger, Axel, Koepler, Oliver, Lorenz, Sören, Mathiak, Brigitte, Miller, Bernhard, Pelz, Peter, Rißler-Pipka, Nanette, Ritz, Raphael, Sax, Ulrich, Schimmler, Sonja, Schörner, Thomas, Schubotz, Moritz, … Suchodoletz, Dirk von. (2022). Base4NFDI - Basic Services for NFDI (Version 1). Zenodo.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8329192
2023-08-24
"Connecting Communities" is the theme of the first Conference on Research Data Infrastructure (CoRDI) , which will take place from 12 to 14 September in Karlsruhe, Germany. By invitation from the German National Research Data Infrastructure association (NFDI), more than 600 national and international stakeholders from all areas of research and the infrastructures will be present. Including, of course, the Base4NFDI team!
If you have any questions about the project, the submission process or the basic services currently under development, please join us at the "Market of the Consortia”. You can meet us on ...
Wednesday, 13th September, 12:30 p.m.-2 p.m.
Wednesday, 13th September, 3:30 p.m.- 4 p.m.
Thursday, 14th September, 12:00 p.m.-1:30 p.m.
Thursday, 14th September, 3 p.m.-3:30 p.m.
2023-08-15
Four new proposals have been submitted to Base4NFDI in the final submission round that ended on August 15th 2023. Three applications were submitted for the initialization phase and one for the integration phase (IAM4NFDI). Take a look and get to know the services that are being discussed in the upcoming weeks:
NFDI Research Software Marketplace "nfdi.software"
nfdi.software will implement a central research software marketplace to enable access to a large portfolio of research software relevant to researchers and research software engineers. nfdi.software will integrate information on relevance and adoption of software in communities and connect research software to publications, data, services and more.
A central Jupyter Hub "Jupyter4NFDI"
Though Jupyter notebooks are widely used across scientific disciplines, their deployment through individual JupyterHubs results in access barriers to computational and data resources. Jupyter4NFDI aims to unify these efforts by offering a centralized service, simplify access, support the import of projects and extend the reach of Jupyter to a broader audience.
Competence Training for Research Data Management "RDMTraining4all"
RDMTraining4all aims to develop modular teaching concepts and materials that can be used to create training programmes and courses in research data management (RDM). Experts in RDM training will furthermore support training responsibles in the consortia in transforming these modular concepts and materials into discipline-specific training programmes and running and certifying the corresponding training activities.
Identity and Access Management “IAM4NFDI”
IAM4NFDI is concerned with connecting and expanding existing and emerging IAM systems in a way that researchers from different domains and institutions are able to access digital resources existing within NFDI as easily as possible, including access to and exchange with external infrastructures and resources. IAM4NFDI aims to create a decentralized, federated Identity and Access Management and will conclude their initialization phase in February 2024.
IAM4NFDI was the first proposal to successfully pass the first round of submissions in February 2023. After the last few months of development, the service is now ready to move from the initialization phase to the integration phase.
A decision about the funding of these four services will be made in October by the Consortia Assembly and after evaluation by the Technical Expert Committee. This year, NFDI sections were able to submit applications for basic services on three dates. Are you planning a proposal yourself? Check our templates and submission rounds for 2024!
