Sprecher
Beschreibung
The Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI) encompasses 26 consortia across life sciences, humanities, natural sciences, and engineering. Research data infrastructures, including the NFDI, face the challenge of a heterogeneous landscape of terminologies and semantic descriptions. These differences stem from diverse modeling paradigms, ranging from lightweight SKOS vocabularies to expressive OWL ontologies, rather than just disciplinary boundaries. While resources often overlap conceptually, differing logical commitments and formalization levels complicate alignment and reuse.
Despite the shared goal of FAIR data, integration remains a manual and high-effort task. Interdisciplinary research, such as Archaeology, which synthesizes data from molecular biology, building engineering, and material science—requires the reconciliation of diverse data formats. Machine-actionable mappings are therefore essential for practical, scalable interoperability.
To address this, the NFDI Section (Meta)Data Working Group on Ontology Harmonization and Mapping was established in 2023. Its scope includes promoting convergence on shared ontologies, terminologies, or vocabularies whenever possible, adopting technical good practices for their development, documentation, and long-term maintenance, and collaborating with the NFDI Task Force Metadata to standardize metadata. When harmonization is not feasible due to domain-specific frameworks, we focus on the reuse and definition of formal, machine-readable, and commonly shared mappings between such semantic resources.
The research community lacks a mature, reusable solution for the standardized publication and discovery of such mappings. Our working group investigates the technical requirements for a framework to ensure mappings are as FAIR as the data they describe. We advocate for SSSOM as an emerging standard for 1:1 mappings while coordinating with international bodies like the RDA FAIR Mappings WG. By making mappings and guidelines discoverable via shared registries, we enable federated queries across disciplinary knowledge graphs.
We present an overview of the activities of the working group, emphasizing tooling evaluations, international coordination, and the complementary roles of harmonization and mapping in supporting NFDI-wide adoption.