Sprecher
Beschreibung
The PUNCH4NFDI (Particles, Universe, NuClei and Hadrons for German National Research Data Infrastructure) consortium brings together researchers and data-infrastructure specialists from fundamental physics communities such as astro-, astroparticle, particle, and nuclear physics. As pioneers of computationally intensive, data-driven research, these communities have decades of experience in developing research data management strategies and knowledge infrastructures. Consequently, a wide variety of semantic artefacts (also referred to in the literature as knowledge artefacts), defined as machine-actionable and machine-readable formalisations of domain knowledge enabling discovery, interpretation, and reuse of research data by humans and machines, has emerged. Encompassing thesauri, vocabularies, ontologies, metadata schemas and standards, these discipline-specific artefacts have been developed to support diverse levels of abstraction, research data lifecycles and scientific use cases. Examples include the international metadata standards developed by the LQCD (Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics) and IVOA (International Virtual Observatory Alliance) communities, metadata schemas used by platforms such as the CERN Open Data portal and the KASCADE Cosmic-Ray Data Centre (KCDC), IVOA keywords and many more. While these artefacts are well suited to their respective communities and many of them are widely adopted internationally, they are based on heterogeneous data and metadata models, representation formalisms, and encoding strategies. Alongside domain-specific artefacts, a wide range of general-purpose, cross-domain standards—such as DCMI Metadata Terms, DataCite, as well as shared controlled vocabularies and ontologies—are employed within the underlying knowledge infrastructures of fundamental physics, acting as integrative elements across disciplines.
This contribution aims to provide a systematic cross-disciplinary overview of knowledge artefacts in computationally intensive fundamental physics and to facilitate informed discussion on practical approaches to harmonisation and interoperability, promoting FAIR and machine-actionable reuse of complex research data.
| Alternative Track | 8. Semantics in Practice: Domain & Application Ontologies |
|---|