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. This week's News Digest is special since from now on, Charles Tapley Hoyt↗ will support this News Digest with guest contributions. Charlie will be providing periodic updates on behalf of the NFDI Section Metadata Working Group for Ontology Harmonization and Mapping covering new records, updated records, additions to the NFDI consortium collections, and other updates.
I am truly thankful that Charlie will enrich this weekly overviews with his expertise.
So the structure of today's news digest is slightly different. It will start with an introduction to the Semantic Farm by Charlie, then you will find the regular updates, and at the end there is the new section on Semantic Farm updates, which will be a more regular thing now.
I am very existed so let us dive right in.
Introduction to the Semantic Farm
The Semantic Farm↗ is an open source, community-curated registry of ontologies, controlled vocabularies, persistent identifier (PID) schemes, and other semantic spaces.
Researchers interested in making their data more FAIR can use the Semantic Farm to find relevant ontologies, controlled vocabularies, etc. to annotate their data and metadata. It provides an actionable standard for prefixes, CURIEs, and URIs that appear in linked (open) data and a companion Python software package to support data standardization and integration.
The NFDI Section Metadata Working Group for Ontology Harmonization and Mapping↗ maintains this resource along with international collaborators and more than 100 unique contributors. While it was originally constructed to support research in the life sciences and previously was called the Bioregistry, its usage in the NFDI has led to its expansion towards being fully domain-agnostic and covering the remaining natural sciences, engineering sciences, and humanities and social sciences. Notably, the Semantic Farm contains collections describing the ontologies used by each NFDI Consortium↗ in partnership with members of consortia themselves.
FAIRmat
NOMAD v2.0.0 is out
A major new version of NOMAD is now out, with a new look and feel as well as some new features and major changes in the software. You can read more about it in the news section of the FAIRmat's↗ webpage, check out the release note for version v2.0.0↗ or just go to the NOMAD webpage↗, where you will be guided through the new design (and features). The tour of NOMAD 2.0 is really well done and highlights what has changed. I recommend having a look. If you are running a NOMAD Oasis, you should have a look at the NOMAD v2.0. migration guide↗.
NFDI4Chem
Getting IUPAC names for chemical structures right
Creating correct IUPAC names from chemical structures can be a difficult task. With Orthonym there is now a new tool available that helps researchers with this. The tool was developed at the Beilstein Institut and you can read more about it in the article on Orthonym↗ on the NFDI4Chem webpage, published by Christoph Steinbeck. There is also a web app, so you can directly try it yourself.
PUNCH4NFDI
Overview of services, use cases and more
Not sure what the services of PUNCH4NFDI are? Or looking for a use case? Then check out the poster on NFDI4PUNCH↗ by Victoria Tokareva, Christiane Schneide and Baida Achkar, published in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23568689. New for me was the Digital Research Products Hub (DRPHub), which I need to explore much more.
Semantic Farm Updates from Early October 2026
74 records were added for ontologies from the World Avatar↗, which support multiscale modelling from the molecular level (relevant for NFDI4Chem and NFDI4Cat) to municipal systems and weather patterns. You can find more information in one of my blog articles on the World Avatar↗.
A record describing the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESFR) Experimental Techniques Ontology (ESRFET)↗ was added and members of NFDI4DAPHNE suggested several improvements to physics-related ontologies, including the NeXus Ontology↗; also used by DAPHNE4NFDI, FAIRmat, and NFDI-MatWerk) and the Photon and Neutron Experimental Techniques Ontology (PaNET↗). This demonstrates the relatively low barrier for community involvement in the Semantic Farm↗ and that NFDI consortia and their members can take initiative to maintain records describing both their first-party resources and third-party resources they use.
Six additional records were added (five of which cover cell line resources appearing in Cellosaurus cross-references) and 54 records were updated with additional information. For more details check the Semantic Farm Updates↗.
Outro
That is it for today. I want to thank Charlie again for enriching this weekly overviews. I want to thank you all for reading, liking and sharing the News Digest. Have a wonderful day and see you next week.
Benjamin
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