Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration – Paving the road to FAIR for Helmholtz

In 2019, the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres set up the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC) platform to tackle the topic of metadata within its organization. HMC was established with the mission to leverage the visibility and reusability of data across the Helmholtz Association and beyond, and to turn FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) research data into reality. The vision is to create a sustainable, distributed, semantically enriched FAIR Helmholtz data space.

Over the last four years we have put great efforts into reaching our goals. Our work is focussed on three key strategic areas:

(1)   Assessing and monitoring the state of FAIR data across Helmholtz
Through a mixed method approach we are continuously learning about the data ecosystem within Helmholtz and beyond and communicate them to relevant stakeholders. Those findings enable individuals and institutions alike to identify concrete actions to improve data handling. Measures and results so far include community survey conducted, a FAIR data dashboard and an information portal established.

(2)   Facilitating connectivity of Helmholtz research data
The Helmholtz data space will enable scientists to easily find and combine data from different scientific domains. Within our platform its technical and social features were define d. Several tools were developed and deployed, workflows for e.g., the backbone for FAIR Digital Objects were implemented and a first Helmholtz Knowledge Graph (connecting data from 32 data providers) was released.  

(3)   Transforming (meta)data recommendations into implementations. 
Our stakeholders act on different levels of the Helmholtz research data ecosystem. Through offering practical advice, training and guidelines on implementing community recommendations we aim to bridge different levels in knowledge, communication and technical capabilities between them and harmonize the approaches across Helmholtz. Further, annual calls for community projects are used to implement specific community solutions.

Our work is closely intertwined with national (e.g. National Research Infrastructure Germany (NFDI)) and international (e.g. EOSC, RDA) efforts which is ensured through collaboration with the relevant partners.

We want to present our approach, some of our results and the lessons learnt on our road to FAIR. By sharing our experiences with the RDA-DE community, we want to engage in an active discussion on (meta)data, relevant stakeholder and how to shape our path to a FAIR data ecosystem together.