| Description: |
Services of NFDI4ING to integrate the creation of FAIR Digital Objects (FDOs) into existing scientific workflows. An important aspect is the availability of FDOs within the service landscape, including their creation and programmatic access, while also making a connection with application from industry. In general, an FDO is defined as a machine-readable and machine actionable unit of data that is identified by a PID and described by a record. The FDO record therefore should include the most critical information about the objects' context and possible operations. The context should be a minimal set of metadata, in the sense that it should allow discovery and re-usability. Operations define how to access the binary data and further metadata – they can be as simple as a HTTP GET (transfer a single file) or a description of a complex interface (e.g., for a Web Map Tile Service or a SPARQL endpoint). Ultimately, an FDO is a technical incarnation of the FAIR principles. Being widely technology and platform independent, the FDO concept eases long term interoperability, spanning across different system life-times or implementations. With the implementation of the FDO concept, it is further possible to separate data storage, PID registration, metadata and publication in building blocks, allowing a more modular architecture. Several flavors of FDOs are evolving in the community, with great effort to ensure that these are compatible semantically. Within the data management platform Coscine we are aiming to translate and map several flavors. Services like Coscine can further act as a hub or layer between different representations for decentralized systems landscapes and bridge to other (commercial) European data spaces, e.g. Catena-X via the Dataspace protocol. Cosine is complemented by a series of local NFDI4ING tools that help researchers to use semantic metadata profiles. These can be developed, typed and shared utilizing the NFDI4ING metadata profile service. For research related to the built environment, the NFDI4ING ingest service supports building information models based on the IFC standard as well as point-clouds. Within the context of more industrial applications comes the notion of a Data Product. While a data products' definition originates from the FAIR principles, building a FAIR Data Product with an FDO at its base further assures inherent technical capabilities. On the other hand, Data Products bring in concepts of value, ownership, quality standards or life-cycle management related to the data itself. |