National Research Data Infrastructure for and with Computer Science (NFDIxCS)

The main goal of the NFDIxCS consortium is to identify, define and deploy an infrastructure for the operation of services which store complex domain-specific data objects from the vast field of Computer Science (CS) and to implement the FAIR principles across the board. This includes producing reusable data objects which contain not only various types of CS data including the associated metadata, but also the corresponding software, context and execution information in a standardized form. These data objects – the so-called Research Data Management Containers – can be of any size, structure and quality. Specifically, we address the following issues:

1. NFDIxCS will promote the implementation of the FAIR data principles for CS research data and software artifacts, simplify the citation of software and CS data and thus modernize the publication processes and culture of both CS and its applications. NFDIxCS provides a forum for the discussion of CS research data formats, metadata formats and semantics. It will work towards generally accepted standards, in particular for the sustainable storage, retrieval and availability of CS research data.

2. NFDIxCS will, in collaboration with other scientific disciplines, support the application of CS methods such as Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. In addition, the operation of these systems generates large amounts of data, e.g. in the areas of high performance computing and computer architecture, which in turn also contribute to the further development of genuine CS methods.

3. NFDIxCS will share the experience and knowledge of the CS community on system architectures, processes, standards for interoperability, data-oriented scientific publication and communication systems with all interested scientific disciplines / consortia in the NFDI family.

The association GI (Gesellschaft für Informatik) – comprising related specialist groups and communication channels – in combination with other partners at national, European and international level will be used as a basis and starting point to create an open environment to support all researchers in CS with their research data needs. The core principle in NFDIxCS is to establish an organizational and technical, cooperative and interoperable, extensible and open infrastructure to bundle the existing forces of relevant services and actors from and for CS. For this purpose, qualitative content analysis from the CS community will be used to empirically derive the requirements of the sub-disciplines from their profile descriptions and transfer them into an open service infrastructure. The developed services will be designed for sustainable operation at minimal cost. Targeted community development for cultural change will support young academics to negotiate practices and norms and to develop the competencies to handle their research data responsibly.