Research data infrastructure
NFDI4Earth
National research data infrastructure for Earth sciences.
- Main goal
- Make the scattered data, software and training material of the Earth System Sciences findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable — by linking existing community services into one architecture rather than replacing them.
- Business domain
- Research data infrastructure
- Size
- 67 partner institutions · 5 central services · DFG-funded, coordinated by TU Dresden
- Strategic decisions
- Reuse community services rather than rebuild them
- Two entry points — one human, one machine
- Metadata as RDF, served over a SPARQL API
- Technologies
- RDF · Cordra · React
- Keywords
- building-block · blackbox-whitebox · deployment-view · constraints · stakeholders
NFDI4Earth is the Earth System Sciences consortium of Germany’s Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI) — 67 partner institutions, coordinated by TU Dresden and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, project no. 460036893). Earth system data exists in abundance: hundreds of repositories, catalogues, portals and tools, each built by a different institute for a different discipline. NFDI4Earth links them into one place to search, and leaves every one of them where it is.
Two things make it worth reading. It documents a portfolio, not a system — five services the consortium builds itself, plus a long tail it only harvests from — so section 3 spends most of its length on what NFDI4Earth does not promise about other people’s servers. And it is unfinished in public: seven of the twelve sections are written, and the rest say so, in the original as well as here.
The architecture team
Software decisions for NFDI4Earth are not made by whoever writes the code. They are made by a standing NFDI4Earth Architecture Team, on the proposal of and in consultation with the measure lead responsible for the service — within 14 days, and escalating to the steering group when team and measure lead cannot agree. Section 9 documents that process before it documents any decision, which is the right order and a rarer thing to find written down than the decisions themselves.
The team is Auriol Degbelo, Christin Henzen, Carsten Keßler, Ralf Klammer, Daniel Nüst and Claus Weiland, from TU Dresden, Hochschule Bochum and the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung. It can be reached at nfdi4earth-architecture@tu-dresden.de, and its work is described on the software architecture team page.
The documentation reproduced here was written by Christin Henzen, Anna Brauer, Auriol Degbelo, Stephan Frickenhaus, Jonas Grieb, Stephan Hachinger, Ralf Klammer, Claudia Müller, Johannes Munke, Tom Niers, Daniel Nüst, Claus Weiland and Alexander Wellmann.
Where to go next
The consortium
- nfdi4earth.de — the project home page
- Software architecture team — the six people who take the decisions in section 9
The services this documentation describes
- OneStop4All — the entry point for people
- EduTrain — the learning platform
- NFDI4Earth Ontology — the shared metadata schema
Sources
- Software Architecture Documentation, Zenodo, 2024 — the PDF these chapters come from
- Online architecture documentation — the consortium’s living version, which carries the deployment detail
- Developer guide — the conventions constraint 14 refers to