RDM tools in practice

There were three new uploads to the DAPHNE4NFDI Zenodo community. Two presentations on the reference database for X-ray absorption spectroscopy (RefXAS) and one poster on data management at DESY with SciCat. In the News Digest, I reported about both of these things in the past, but in case you haven’t had the chance to check this out in more details, do it today. These are two great examples for research data management (RDM) tools in use, and can be helpful to include as examples for databases (RefXAS) and RDM in large research institutions (SciCat at DESY) in your next presentation. Especially the example at DESY shows how you can establish new processes and get from a demonstration to a larger scale.

From demonstrator beamline SciCat instances towards usefulness and large scale deployment. [Poster]
Link to poster on Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15962116

The RefXAS database Current Status and Future Plans [Presentation]
Link to presentation on Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.16676553

RefXAS database Metadata Fields, Quality Criteria and Data formats [Presentation]
Link to presentation on Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.16677714

Improvements for mass spectra data

The MassBank library got a major update which improves the performance as well as the user experience. In case you are not familiar with the MassBank library, it is an open-source library for high-resolution mass spectrometry data. Check out the release announcement of version 3.0 at the NFDI4Chem webpage, and discover the new version yourself at massbank.eu. I recommend sharing this news with potential users, I am sure, feedback on the new version is very much appreciated.

Link to release announcement on nfdi4chem.de

Link to massbank.eu

The commitment is a conversation starter

In September 2024, NFDI4Earth published their paper on the Commitment to FAIRness and Openness to promote the common vision of NFDI4Earth. Now, a presentation from a coffee lecture in March 2025 was published, which is presenting this commitment in more details. As they say themselves in the presentation, the commitment can be a great conversation starter. I highly recommend checking out the presentation and add it to your slides for discussions with your Earth System Science researchers. In the presentation you will also find 12 points, they are committing to including usage of domain repositories, supporting with trainings, and the adoption of Data Management Plans, worth a look.

NFDI4Earth Coffee Lecture on the NFDI4Earth FAIRness and Openness Commitment [Presentation]
Link to presentation on Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.16752973

Successful RDM stories – NFDI4Earth Pilot Projects

I mentioned the NFDI4Earth Pilot Projects already in the past, these are small project with the goal of solving or prototyping a specific problem in handling data. Today I have two of these examples for, these could (again) be great resources for your collection of successful RDM stories.

The first one is CAPICE. Just imagine you need to run simulations on distributed HPC systems, which means you need to interact with different infrastructures. In this project, a blueprint was developed how simulations across different computing infrastructures could be done without the need of manual intervention. As an example, the “Ice Sheet System Model (ISSM) is executed on one platform using input data sourced from another, without requiring the user to manually access or operate either”

CAPICE Combined Analysis and Publication of Ice Sheet data [Report]
Link to report on Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14410879

The second Pilot Project is called OcMOD (Observations closer to Model Data), the goal of the project is to bridge the gap between reference data provided by public authorities and model data from research institutions for climate data. Tackling the difference in metadata standards as well as the question of accessibility. In the project, a blueprint for “Standardisation and making public authority data available” was developed. The blueprint was already published in English in October 2024 but is now also available in German.

Parameter Survey for Standardised COSMO-REA6 Output [Other]
Link to survey output on Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.11108657

OcMOD – Observations closer to MOdel Data [Report]
Link to report on Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15860432

Standardisierung und Bereitstellung von Behördendaten für die Forschung [Workflow]
Linkto workflow on Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15878879

FAIR-aligned data stewards should be positioned

In April 2025, a one-day workshop with the title “NFDI4Earth Synthesis Architecture” was done, now the workshop report was published. Flagging this for all people interested in getting some more insights in NFDI4Earth and their plans. I also want just to pick one aspect which was discussed during the workshop. How to make the services that are available more visible. And one answer was to promote Data as a Service (DaaS) by demonstration of successful use cases as well as position data stewards which are committed to FAIRness and Openness. It is an interesting read, so check it out.

Workshop Report: NFDI4Earth Synthesis Architecture [Report]
Link to report on Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15853504

Interconnectivity of tools

If you are in contact which researchers that are using electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) or are thinking about using ELNs, you are probably also familiar with the expectation, that since they do the documentation in the ELN, they also want to run the analysis there. Which is understandable, but not always possible or in the scope of an ELN. In my opinion, an ELN should do one thing, enable the research to document all their research in the best possible way, but data analysis should be done by the appropriate tools, and therefore we need interconnectivity between tools. And there are already many solutions to such problems. Today I want to highlight the latest development of RSpace, allowing to run analysis from RSapce directly in Galaxy with more or less the click of a button.

Outro

That’s it for today. As always, I hope you found something useful in this edition. I’d like to close with a question for you: in this News Digest, we often share great examples of successful RDM stories and workflow implementations.

Would you like a better, browsable overview of these use cases—something you could easily explore and search? Or is it enough that I simply mention them here, and you add them to your own collection? 

Thanks for reading and sharing the News Digest and see you next week.

Benjamin