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. I would like to welcome Charles Tapley Hoyt↗ again, in case you missed it in last week's News Digest↗, Charles will provide regular updates about the semantic farm from now on. The News Digest is packed today, so let us dive right in.
PUNCH4NFDI
Rewarding outstanding works
Congratulations to Baida Achkar for receiving the ATLAS Outstanding Achievement Award for the work on ATLAS Open Data! If you are a regular reader of this News Digest, this name should sound familiar to you, since the work of Baida Achkar is featured from time to time here. Check out the article on the ATLAS Award↗ on the PUNCH4NFDI webpage.
FAIR4ChemNL
FAIRification approaches for Chemistry
If you are looking for practical insights on how data handling can be improved in a university chemistry lab, check out the presentation on FAIRification approaches for chemistry↗ by Sibylle Schwartmann. The examples are from an inorganic chemistry and catalysis lab. New for me was the Python package ChromStream for handling gas chromatography data.
Repo4Cat, hdl: 21.11165/4cat/89by-7r44/1↗
NFDI4Chem
Bulk submission in Chemotion Repository
With the latest update, it is now possible to submit samples and reaction in bulk to the Chemotion Repository. This is a major improvement to the data submission process in the repository. You can read more about it in the article on bulk submission↗ published by Pei-Chi Huang published on the website of the Chemotion Repository.
Insights from legacy data
How good is the automatic data extraction from older publications? Ulrich Schatzschneider is exploring this question for 195Pt NMR data in one of the latest NFDI4Chem Stammtisch recordings published on YouTube. It is a very interesting talk that shows the application of automatic data mining, the limitations of automatic data processing and how to overcome some of the limitations.
Talk: From "old" chemistry data to new insights - On the promises and limits of automatic data extraction↗
Newsletter
The latest NFDI4Chem Newsletter↗ is out. If you want to check out all the developments of the past month then check it out, you also find information on upcoming events and workshops. And very important of course, there is still time to apply for the FAIR4Chem Award.
PSDI
RDM as the basis
In the presentation Behind Every Great Research Project is Great Data Management↗ by Samantha Pearman-Kanza you can find useful insights why research data management is so important. In addition, you find for each steps of the data life cycle tips for best practices, software & tools as well as which people can support you are shown. You should also have a look at the slide Five Key Practices for Empowered Data Management, short and to the point. A slide which could be useful to adapt for your work.
Zenodo, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23768254↗
Data curation
What is data curation? Who does data curation? And what has TRUST to do with it? All of these questions, and more, are answered by Ian Bruno et al. in their presentation Towards the PSDI Data Curation Hub: Recommendations and Opportunities↗. Definitely recommended. Publishing data was made easy in the past few years, but I think we need now to also focus more the curation of the published data.
Zenodo, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23733026↗
Data curation and AI
If you want to dive even deeper into the topic of data curation, and want to see practical examples, then you should definitely have a look at the presentation Harnessing automation and AI tools to advance data curation and connect digital infrastructures↗ by Ian Bruno et al. In this presentation many stakeholders e.g. PSDI, NFDI4Chem and RSpace, show their approaches on data curation and AI usage.
Zenodo, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23693903↗
Repository for kinetic mechanisms of reacting systems (ORKiM)
A month ago, I already featured a recording of the PSDI webinar on a repository for kinetic mechanisms by Sergio Vernuccio. Now the slides of the talk ORKiM - an open access repository for kinetic mechanisms↗ are available.
Zenodo, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23686232↗
Ask The Elephant
Meeting on November 5
On Thursday, it is time for the next meeting of Ask The Elephant. In these Ask The Elephant meetings, I invite you to join me for an early morning session to chat about your problems or questions in RDM or just general discussion on latest developments. We usually start with a short input, this time we will have a look at the latest version of the electronic lab notebook eLabFTW. Check out the Ask The Elephant community webpage↗ for more information or to join the community.
Semantic Farm Updates
This week saw several updates to the Semantic Farm, including the implementation of a workflow that ingests and aligns the Library of Congress Class Schemes↗ registry with the Semantic Farm and an update to the workflow that aligns Zazuko↗ registry to ingest additional metadata available through their GitHub repository but not their API.
222 records received updates from a combination of alignment to LOC Class Schemes, enrichment from metadata from Zazuko, and other updates ingested from external registries. 18 new records were added including two external contributions:
- FAIR Mappings Schema (fairmap)↗ was contributed by Nico Matentzoglu↗ as part of the ongoing work of the RDA FAIR Mappings Working Group↗ in biopragmatics/bioregistry#2147↗.
- Scholarly Entity International Persistent Identifier Infrastructure (seipid)↗ was contributed by Nasir Razzaq↗ on behalf of his firm Xpertno Research Center↗ in Pakistan in biopragmatics/bioregistry#2148↗
The new record for Universal Decimal Classification (UDC)↗ was motivated by the Dublin Core Terms encoding schemes↗, the new record for XHTML Datatypes (xh11d)↗ was curated to support the standardized encoding of CURIE and URIs in semantic web artifacts like LinkML, and the rest of the new records were curated from Zazuko, enabled by the newly additional metadata available.
For more details about updates this week, my latest post Semantic Farm and Bioregistry Updates - October 30th, 2026↗.
Outro
After the summer and conference break it is getting busy as we can see in this packed News Digest. Thank you very much for reading and thank you once more to Charlie for adding a section about the semantic farm. Have a wonderful day and see you next week.
Benjamin
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