KGI4NFDI: Knowledge Graph Infrastructure for the German National Research Data Infrastructure

A proposal for a new base service for NFDI, submitted during the first phase of Base4NFDI (see: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8329192).

Summary:
Knowledge Graphs (KG) play an integral role in achieving interoperability in NFDI. While several consortia are building individual KG solutions, reusable KG infrastructure-as-a-service (KGI) is missing. To start discipline-specific KG work easily, NFDI consortia, participant institutions and researchers need reusable, scalable KGI. The proposed base service will provide it. Following a landscape analysis, the initialization phase will focus on a pilot KGI based on Wikibase, the software behind Wikidata. Wikidata is among the most popular, large-scale implementations of KG technology worldwide. It is widely used in scientific knowledge management and is an important advocacy tool for open data. Developing the pilot KGI includes establishing easy-to-scale infrastructure-as-a-service allowing NFDI stakeholders to create KGs without administrative overhead; developing an interoperability framework for connecting KGs with research infrastructures; establishing a KGI-consultancy to increase adoption of the KGI-service. The outcomes of the initialization phase ensure the expansion of the service in subsequent phases: the landscape analysis will lead to new partnerships with additional KG-tool providers; the consultancy service will expand operation beyond Wikibase KGs; and the interoperability framework will extend across Wikibase and non-Wikibase KGs towards a unified NFDI with a EOSC compatibility layer.