Common Service Architecture for NFDI-MatWerk: Technical & Infrastructure Components Built for the MSE Community

We propose a shared service architecture conceptualized within NFDI-MatWerk aiming to lead the materials science community by demonstrating the developed services and applications. Such an architecture, relying on the concept of FAIR, fosters interoperability of existing infrastructure components developed within different research institutions. The existing components are adapted and specifically designed to meet the requirements of material scientists and to make them more usable for their needs. There can be several
perspectives to view such an architecture [1], for example the technical/infrastructure component perspective, software developer’s perspective or the data steward’s perspective.

We provide a schematic overview of the architecture layers, from the technical
perspective of infrastructure providers and software developers. Through such an architecture, we encourage sustainable research data management, to make it available through services, such as the Data Collections Explorer [2]. Furthermore, material scientists can implement for example, analysis workflows, create reference datasets, and materials simulation workflows.
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The proposed service infrastructure features a data & metadata services layer enabling preservation of as well as interaction with data along with their metadata. FAIR Digital Objects are used as a common data representation fostering broad interoperability of the data. This enables the design of processing workflows and knowledge graphs in the Development Environment. Finally, material scientists can build on these workflows to realize applications relevant for their work and develop interfaces, such as ELNs. For such
an infrastructure, discipline-specific support is crucial, particularly by data stewards, through training and teaching activities, data governance and harmonization of interfaces, data, and metadata formats.

Acknowledgments
Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under the National Research Data Infrastructure – NFDI 38/1 – project number 460247524.

References:
[1] Marius Politze, Yusra Shakeel, Sirieam Hunke, Philipp Ost, Rossella Aversa, Benedikt Heinrichs, Ilona Lang, “Long Term Interoperability of Distributed Research Data Infrastructures”, 2023, DOI: https://doi.org/10.52825/cordi.v1i.348.
[2] Philipp Ost, Yusra Shakeel, Philipp Tögel, “Data Collections Explorer – An Easy-to-Use Tool for Sharing and Discovering Research Data”, 2023, DOI: https://doi.org/10.52825/cordi.v1i.405.