The national research data infrastructure NFDI4Earth aiming for interoperability among various research data fields

The National Research Data Infrastructure for Earth System Science (NFDI4Earth) aims to create a networked infrastructure connecting different research data sources (repositories, data bases) to overcome the challenges associated with Research Data Management (RDM) in Germany. Researchers collaborate in international research teams, resulting in interconnection between national and international activities. Thus, a core element of the initiative is the ambition to harmonize the research data landscape on a national level and to connect them with international initiatives. The key areas of interest are to increase the interoperability between different research data domains, metadata standardization, controlled vocabularies, application programming and the setup of different service interfaces. NFDI4Earth would like to support researchers in various aspects such as discovering and exploring relevant data sources, publishing and curating data and addressing research data management challenges. NFDI4Earth focuses on being attractive for the user by having a user-friendly entry point (OneStop4All), services such as a living handbook, user support network, educational resources, and an academy for early career scientists, the knowledge hub as the technical backend, as well as participative opportunities. NFDI4Earth is open to promote common metadata standards, to support, motivate and enable the wider ESS community appropriately to move towards FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and Open Science Data principles. NFDI4Earth initiatives are in line with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), an ecosystem of research data and related services; such as multidisciplinary projects FAIRCore4EOSC and FAIR-EASE. Thus, NFDI4Earth advances the cultural shift towards FAIR and open RDM.