Welcome to the News Digest – RDM in Natural Science. Each week, I explore the latest developments in research data management, focusing specifically on natural sciences, and provide a concise overview. Let us dive right in.
eLabFTW
Template hub and the .eln file format
Great news from the eLabFTW developers and community: There is now a first version of a central template hub for your eLabFTW templates available. The hub enables users to share their templates with the community easily. This template hub was in discussion in the RDM Club of eLabFTW for a while now, and it is great to see that it is now starting to slowly take off. So if you are working with eLabFTW in any way, you need to check this out. You can learn more about the hub as well as the .eln file format (and the ELN Consortium), which enables sharing (meta)data between different ELNs in the recording of the latest community meeting. The video below starts directly with the presentation of the template hub by Sydney Koke, but it is worth checking out the whole recording.
FAIRmat
Overview and the NOMAD Gallery
Last week the 8th FAIRmat User Meeting took place in Berlin and Lukas Pielsticker presented the "recent developments and future directions" of FAIRmat as well as NOMAD. You can find the presentation on Zenodo, and it provides a good overview. The highlight for me is the new (at least for me) NOMAD Gallery. NOMAD Gallery is a "space to showcase innovative features, uploads, and use cases created with the NOMAD platform". I definitely recommend checking it out. The visual presentation in NOMAD Gallery is just a joy, and it is easy to browse the different use cases.
Link to the presentation in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20757796
Link to the NOMAD Gallery
NFDI4Chem
Step-by-step: The Editors4Chem 3.5 workshop
In the Editors4Chem workshop series, NFDI4Chem is discussing with publishers, infrastructure provides as well as the community on how to foster a better data publishing culture. Discussion points of latest meeting were the memorandum of understanding, incentives for authors as well as practical solutions. Read more about it on the NFDI4Chem webpage in a published article by Sonja Herres-Pawlis.
Link to the article on the NFDI4Chem webpage
NFDI4Earth
Linking survey with spatial data
Looking for an infrastructure that lets you work with social survey data in combination with spatial data? Then check out the poster by Gotthard Meinel et al. on SoRa. It is a secure way of linking survey and spatial datasets.
Link to the poster in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20717129
Workflow to improve geospatial ML predictions
In the earth system sciences, machine learning is getting more and more important but to use tools like ML, but a robust labelling system is important. With GeoLabel, Teja Kattenborn et al. present a workflow which allows users to easily correct and label geospatial data.
Link to report in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20699510
What's your target group?
If you are developing services or tools, one of the key questions should be: Who will use it, once it is developed? What is my community and how large is this community? Ivonne Anders et al. had a closer look and estimated the NFDI4Earth user base. Learn more about how they tackled the question and what the NFDI4Chem user community looks like in their report on Zenodo.
Link to the report in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20761625
PUNCH4NFDI
reana: A data analysis platform
Check out a presentation by Christiane Schneide discussing the PUNCH4NFDI infrastructure (e.g. Storage4PUNCH and Compute4PUNCH) and which role reana, the data analysis platform plays.
Link to the presentation in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20697075
RSpace
Chemistry-specific tools
In the past year, RSpace worked on their representation of chemistry-specific information and moved from closed-source proprietary solutions to open-source solutions and is planing to add more features to support researchers not only with the documentation of their research but also the publication of the data. You can read more about the recent developments in an article by Tilo Mates.
Link to the article on the RSpace webpage
The FAIR Elephant
Ask The Elephant community
I am excited to announce Ask The Elephant. Ask the Elephant is a monthly community space for researchers as well as research data management professionals from the natural and life sciences to discuss their open questions on data management, tools, workflows and more. Each session will start with a short input on a selected topic and then opens into discussion and questions, even beyond the topic of the day. The first pilot session of this new format will take place on July 16 at 8 am (CET). Sign up now to join the Ask The Elephant community and receive information, invitations and reminders for upcoming sessions. Any questions? Ask in the comments. Looking forward to seeing you in the next Ask The Elephant session.
Link to Ask The Elephant on the webpage of The FAIR Elephant
Outro
That's it for today. Thanks for reading, and see you next week.
Benjamin
If you find these weekly overviews useful, please like, and share them with your colleagues and if you want to support me even more, you can go over to my ko-fi page and buy a bag of peanuts for The FAIR Elephant. Your support is much appreciated.