Building the German Research Data Infrastructure NFDI – for and with Computer Science

On November 4, 2022, the Joint Science Conference (GWK) selected Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics and the consortium NFDIxCS for federal and state funding within the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). The consortium will be funded in the double-digit millions of Euros and over a duration of five years. Together with its sister consortium NFDI4DataScience, this is already the second NFDI grant that has been awarded to Schloss Dagstuhl.

The NFDI is a collaborative, nationwide network to systematically index, interconnect, and make openly available the valuable stock of data from science and research. Together with 16 other leading partner institutions, Schloss Dagstuhl aims to systematically manage research data in computer science. The main goal of NFDIxCS is to identify, define and deploy central infrastructure services for the computer science community, and to implement the “FAIR principles” (findabily, accesibility, interoperability, and reuse) across the board. This includes producing reusable data objects which contain not only various domain-specific types of data and their associated metadata, but also the corresponding software, context and execution information in a standardized form.

Schloss Dagstuhl’s internationally renown research information infrastructures – the Open Access publishing platform DROPS and the dblp computer science bibliography – will play a crucial role in fulfilling this mission. Results of NFDIxCS will be maintained and extended by Schloss Dagstuhl for the computer science community as open services, as open research data, and as open knowledge graphs well beyond the initial funding duration.