NFDI4ING - Proposal for renewed funding of NFDI4ING in the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI)

The renewal proposal of NFDI4ING (NFDI 9/1 – DFG project number 442146713) outlines the consortium's strategy for its second funding period, building on its mission to establish a sustainable, standardised, and FAIR-aligned research data infrastructure for the engineering sciences in Germany. Covering the period from 2025 to 2030, the proposal focuses on scaling, consolidating, and deeply integrating the results of the first funding period in the national and international RDM landscape.

This focus is exemplified by the development and perpetuation of task areas adressing overarching topics, such as Training, Education, and Standardisation (TES), Semantic Metadata and Knowledge Graphs (SKG), Federated Interactive Data Space (FIS), the RDM Copilot (CPT), and the open-access journal ing.grid. These "overarching solutions" frame and synergistically interconnect the consortium's planned activities in the second funding period. The archetype task areas established in the first funding period will continue to provide method-specific solutions while closely collaborating in shared tasks. Their foci changed only slightly:

• experimental setups (Alex)
• engineering research software (Betty)
• provenance tracking (Caden)
• high-performance measurement and computation (Doris)
• complex systems and model-based simulations (Ellen)
• data re-use, combination and enrichment (new archetype Fiona, integrates former archetypes Golo & Frank)

In the second funding period, the consortium prioritises the implementation of FAIR Digital Objects, common metadata standards, and interoperable knowledge graphs to close data cycles, improve data provenance, and ensure AI-readiness of engineering data. NFDI4ING continues its role in contributing key aspects of NFDI-wide base services such as IAM4NFDI, PID4NFDI, Jupyter4NFDI, and TS4NFDI. The consortium actively promotes the vision of OneNFDI through cross-consortial collaborations and shared standards.