Context and Scope

Today, there are numerous scattered and heterogeneous services supporting RDM in ESS. Some of them are project-based and do not have a long-term perspective or are not openly available to all researchers. In addition, the implementation of RDM concepts, FAIR principles and related concepts differ among researchers, institutions, and disciplines. NFDI4Earth contributes to aligning existing and emerging RDM services along FAIR and Openness principles and to working towards a unifying and long-term perspective for services. Thus, NFDI4Earth targets the consolidation and harmonization of research data-related services in ESS and linking these services into the NFDI4Earth software architecture (see the NFDI4Earth proposal).

The development of the NFDI4Earth architecture is supported and influenced by several external drivers. For instance, the architecture reuses / integrates well-known and accepted existing services, components, and resources from the ESS community and infrastructure providers. Moreover, the NFDI4Earth architecture benefits and contributes to the activities of the national research data infrastructure (NFDI) in case of 1) consuming / integrating NFDI basic services and 2) developing strategies for reusing / integrating services across NFDI consortia.

Out of scope

The following aspects are beyond the scope of the NFDI4Earth Software Architecture:

• Guarantee for availability and functional correctness of integrated services. NFDI4Earth cannot ensure availability and functional correctness of integrated services. However, existing information on both aspects will be made available for the users.
• Correctness of harvested or linked (meta)data. Harvested or linked (meta)data are provided as-is by referencing the data source and information on curation / quality assurance when available.
• Completeness of harvested or linked (meta)data. NFDI4Earth integrates existing services with no claim to completeness.
• Up-to-dateness of information. NFDI4Earth will systematically evaluate several information during the project period. Due to the amount of harvested and provided information, NFDI4Earth will apply different strategies for the different resource types and data sources, e.g., a community approach to update or to notify needs for information update for exclusively provided (within NFDI4Earth manually collected) information.
• Compliance for specifications and standards. NFDI4Earth will not check compliance for external sources, but will provide existing information from the providers.
• Business and operational models and sustainability for existing (external) project-based ESS services after funding. NFDI4Earth will not host and maintain all existing (external) ESS services after the end of the services’ project periods, but will first evaluate a proposed service against relevant functional and non-functional requirements.