Welcome to the latest News Digest! Each week, I explore the latest developments in research data management, focusing specifically on natural sciences, and provide a concise overview. This week there are numerous video recordings. Let’s dive right in!
New Zenodo uploads
A new poster with information on the X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) reference database RefXAS was published, with information of workflows, quality criteria for data curation general features of the RefXAS website as well as next step. So check it out yourself:
RefXAS: XAS Reference Database under DAPHNE4NFDI [Poster]
Link to poster on Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15095707
Recording Tutorial 16: Getting started with NOMAD
The recording of the latest tutorial, number 16, on Getting started with NOMAD for materialss-science research data management is now available on YouTube. The tutorial consists of four videos: 1) a general introduction on NOMAD 2) How to explore NOMAD with search filters and widgets 3) How to publish raw data and 4) How to use the ELN functionality of NOMAD. In addition to the recordings, the tutorial guide as well as all materials are available on GitHub. You can find all the relevant links below. As always, the FAIRmat tutorials are very well structure and easy to follow. I highly recommend it, if you are new to NOMAD, you should also check out the other past tutorials.
Link to the FAIRmat news page
Link to the guide to the 16th FAIRmat Tutorial
Link to the recordings on YouTube
Link to the FAIRmat tutorial overview
Recording: From research data towards leveraging AI for research
At the NFDI Physical Sciences Joint Colloquium in March, Sören Auer gave a talk with the title From research data towards leveraging AI for research. Please check out the whole presentation, but I also want to point you to ORKG Ask (Open Research Knowledge Graph) and try it yourself. Check out the video below.
Recordings of multiple presentations of the Units, Symbols and Terminology workshop
I hope you brought some time. PSDI has uploaded a nearly 7 hour long recording from The Units, Symbols, and Terminology in the Physical Sciences in and for the Digital Era Workshop which was held at the Royal Society of Chemistry between the 13-14 March 2025. I was unable to go through all the talks by the time I had to write this News Digest and doing it in one session is maybe a bit much (but I surely will watch all of them in the future). Nevertheless, I wanted to provide you here with timestamps to the different talks, so take a look yourself browse through the different titles. I am very sure you will find something interesting. What I can recommend is the first talk by Vanessa A. Seifert with the title Chemical progress in the age of AI (see video below). See the full list here:
Chemical progress in the age of AI - Vanessa A. Seifert
Link to the recording (timestamp: 0:02:46)
Stuff we don't know we know: unpacking tacit assumptions about the semantics of units and dimensions - Blair Hall
Link to the recording (timestamp: 0:45:47)
Human aspects of Units, Symbols, Terminology - Cerys Willoughby
Link to the recording (timestamp: 1:34:40)
Counting Units, are they different from first class units? - Gyorgy Gyomai
Link to the recording (timestamp: 2:18:00)
3rd time lucky - past and current IUPAC projects on terminology for isotopic analyses - Phil Dunn
Link to the recording (timestamp: 2:53:10)
Unicode for Scientific Symbols - Joseph Wright
Link to the recording (timestamp 3:18:09)
IUPAC, UNDRR/ISC Hazard Information Profiles and Disaster Risk Reduction - Virginia Murray
Link to the recording (timestamp 3:34.51)
RSC-IUPAC Committee - Andrew Shore
Link to the recording (timestamp 3:53:46)
FAIR Data Standards - A Crystallographers Perspective - Simon Coles
Link to the recording (timestamp 4:06:00)
A Pragmatic view of the Semantic Web for the Physical Sciences - Samantha Pearman-Kanza
Link to the recording (timestamp 4:43:53)
Information on the digital Green Book and how to represent units and systems - Stuart Chalk
Link to the recording (timestamp 5:21:40)
Where next for DRUM, CDIF and WorldFAIR+? - Simon Hodson
Link to the recording (timestamp 5:55:53)
Discussion round: Units and Names
Link to the recording (timestamp 6:26:15)
Video demonstration on working with metadata in RSpace
A new video demonstration by RSpace was published, where they show in a short (7 min) video how to work with metadata and workflows in RSpace. If you are not familiar with RSpace the video provides a good feel on how to work and interact with data in RSpace.
Fellowship of the Data, meeting PSDI and the next workshop
Last week I joint The Fellowship of the Data meeting in Jena (Germany). It was the first meeting I joint as "The FAIR Elephant" and it was well worth it. The meeting was well organized, had great talks and sessions and, most importantly, enough time to network and connect with fellow research data management enthusiasts. It was also a great place to meet some colleagues from past projects and work on some new ideas. I really hope there will be another Fellowship of the Data in the future. You can check out the program here:
Link to the Fellowship of the Data website
One of my personal highlights was meeting and talking to Samantha Pearman-Kanza and Nicola Knight from PSDI (and of course, Sharkcat) and in addition catching a talk by Samantha Pearman-Kanza live. As people who have followed this News Digest for a while now, know I really like the slides Samantha and the PSDI publish on Zenodo, so it was great to finally see a talk in person.
(Samantha Pearman-Kanza (l), Benjamin Golub-Overbeck (m), Nicola Knight (r), © Nicola Knight)
With the positive energy from the Fellowship of the Data meeting, I look forward to this week. Where I will give another FAIR Research Data Management: Basics for Chemists workshop together with the NFDI4Chem, this time in Stuttgart. It will be the third workshop with the NFDI4Chem this year, and for now, the last, but I hope the collaboration will continue, and we find more opportunities in the future to work together. Looking forward to another week full of discussing discipline-specific RDM.
That is it for today. Hope you enjoyed reading it. See you next week.
Benjamin