From Interdisciplinary Metadata Alignment to Practice in Text+: Results and Implications of the 2nd NFDI Metadata Workshop

The German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) brings together research communities across all scientific domains with the shared goal of enabling FAIR and interoperable research data management. While disciplinary diversity remains a defining strength, it also poses challenges for cross-consortial metadata alignment. Addressing these challenges is the mission of the NFDI Taskforce Metadata within the Section (Meta)data, Terminologies and Provenance.

This presentation reports on the outcomes of the 2nd Interdisciplinary NFDI Metadata Workshop, held in June 2025 at the TIB Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, and discusses their relevance for implementation within Text+ and other NFDI consortia. Building on the first workshop in January 2025, the second workshop shifted the focus from identifying suitable generic metadata schemas to their practical application across disciplines. Sixty-one participants from 25 NFDI consortia collaboratively assessed existing standards and developed community-driven recommendations, documented in the workshop report (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19709639).

A central result is the definition of an NFDI Core Metadata Profile: a schema-agnostic set of mandatory and recommended elements that enables cross-domain interoperability while preserving disciplinary specificity. The workshop reaffirmed the suitability of three established generic metadata standards - DataCite, DCAT-AP and schema.org - as interoperable discovery layers. Rather than prescribing a single schema, the recommendations encourage consortia to adopt at least one of these standards and to align them with their domain-specific metadata models through documented mappings.

For Text+, these results provide a concrete framework for harmonising metadata practices across heterogeneous text- and language-related data types. The recommendations offer best practices for improving interoperability within the consortium and across NFDI as a whole, without imposing mandatory technical requirements. The presentation outlines how Text+ partners can operationalise the Core Metadata Profile, integrate it with existing standards such as ISO 24622, and contribute to a shared, sustainable metadata landscape for the NFDI.

References

Henzen, C., Neidiger, C., Söding, E., & Trippel, T. (2025). Report on the first NFDI Metadata Workshop. Zenodo.DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15227236

Castro, L., Fliegl, H., Henzen, C., Loebe, M., Koepler, O., Neidiger, C., Söding, E., Trippel, T., Stervbo, U., Wiljes, C. (2026). Empfehlung an die Konsortien und Mitglieder des Vereins Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI) e.V. zum Nachweis von NFDI-Datenrepositorien in re3data.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19565419

Fliegl, H., Henzen, C., Koepler, O., Stervbo, U., Söding, E., Trippel, T. (2026). Report on the 2nd Metadata NFDI Workshop, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19709639