NFDI4Ing Mission Statement

NFDI4Ing

NFDI4Ing Mission Statement Join Discussion

Aus dem Abstract https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4015201:

“NFDI4Ing brings together the engineering communities and fosters the management of engineering research data. The consortium represents engineers from all walks of the profession. It offers a unique method-oriented and user-centred approach in order to make engineering research data FAIR – findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable.”

Please click on Join Discussion to join the discussion on the topics discussed in the sections!

NFDI4ING is funded by DFG Project Number 442146713

The Mission: Join Discussion

NFDI4Ing builds the bridges

NFDI4Ing is Guided by the Following Principles:

Technical Interoperability Join Discussion

Based on New European Interoperability Framework, https://dx.doi.org/10.2799/78681

Technical interoperability is commonly defined as the “ability of different information technology systems and software applications to communicate and exchange data”. This definition may be also completed by adding the “ability to accept data from each other and perform a given task in an appropriate and satisfactory manner without the need for extra operator intervention”. That is, it is sometimes completed with an aspect focused on the complete automation of such data exchange.

In the context of this document, we are referring not only to the exchange of data (across scientific experiments, organisations or even communities), but also of other research artefacts that are commonly used in research (software, workflows, protocols, hardware designs, etc.). According to the European Interoperability Framework (EIF), technical interoperability covers “the applications and infrastructures linking systems and services, including interface specifications, interconnection services, data integration services, data presentation and exchange, and secure communication protocols”.

Some examples of technical interoperability aspects and different models for describing data and metadata that have been used in the state of the art are summarised in the following figures:

  1. Linked Data and Research Object models (W3C RDF, OWL)
  2. Microservice architecture (e.g. REST, SOAP)
  3. Scientific workflows

Problems and Needs Join Discussion

At the level of technical interoperability, some of the usual problems should be considered:

As a result of this analysis, these are some of the needs that can be identified at the level of technical interoperability

Recommendations Join Discussion

Some of the recommendations that can be made in this respect are:

Semantic Interoperability Join Discussion

Semantic interoperability can be defined as “the ability of computer systems to transmit data with unambiguous, shared meaning. Semantic interoperability is a requirement to enable machine computable logic, inferencing, knowledge discovery, and data federation between information systems”. (FAIRsFAIR deliverable D2.1 Report on FAIR requirements for persistence and interoperability 2019. https://zenodo.org/record/3557381)

That is, semantic interoperability is achieved when the information transferred has, in its communicated form, all of the meaning required for the receiving system to interpret it correctly, even when the algorithms used by the receiving system are unknown to the sending system. Syntactic interoperability (which is commonly associated with technical interoperability) is sometimes identified as a prerequisite to semantic interoperability. It ensures that the precise format and meaning of exchanged data and information is preserved and understood throughout exchanges between parties, in other words ‘what is sent is what is understood’.

Semantic interoperability is established by shared semantic artefacts (ontologies, thesauri) across the communities, which allow homogenising the interpretation and treatment of the exchanged data, and all of its associated resources.

Problems and Needs Join Discussion

At the level of semantic interoperability, some of the usual problems should be considered:

As a result of this analysis, these are some of the needs that can be identified at the level of semantic interoperability:

Recommendations Join Discussion

Some of the recommendations that can be done in this respect are: