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Report on the 2nd NFDI Metadata Workshop Now Published on Zenodo

· 3 min read
Oliver Koepler
Oliver Koepler
Spokesperson Section Metadata

The report on the 2nd NFDI Metadata Workshop has been published on Zenodo. It documents the outcomes of a three-day workshop held on June 25–27, 2025, in Hannover, organized by the Taskforce Metadata of the NFDI Section Metadata, Terminologies, Provenance.

Why a Workshop Series on Metadata?​

Metadata standardisation is one of the core cross-cutting challenges of the NFDI. The Bund-Länder-Vereinbarung (BLV), the foundational agreement between the German federal and state governments establishing the NFDI, explicitly mandates that consortia adhere to established metadata standards. The NFDI Strategy 2025/2026 reinforces this by calling for the harmonisation of diverse metadata formats across scientific disciplines to enhance the efficiency and interoperability of the entire research data ecosystem.

To address this mandate, the Taskforce Metadata — embedded in the NFDI Section Metadata, Terminologies, Provenance — was established with the goal of promoting the adoption of cross-disciplinary terminologies and metadata schemas across all NFDI consortia. The Taskforce identified three generic metadata standards as primary candidates: the Data Catalog Vocabulary Application Profile (DCAT-AP), the DataCite Metadata Schema, and Schema.org. Rather than imposing a single schema, the strategy follows a three-stage approach: identify and evaluate existing schemas, encourage harmonised adoption, and facilitate the integration of modular, domain-specific extensions.

The workshop series is the central instrument for advancing this agenda through broad community participation.

From Schema Selection to Practical Implementation​

The 1st NFDI Metadata Workshop (January 14–15, 2025, Dresden) brought together approximately 50 metadata experts representing all 26 NFDI consortia. It established that a single, uniform metadata schema is not feasible across the full breadth of NFDI disciplines, but that a shared set of core fields — covering aspects like identifier, title, creator, and license — could form the basis for cross-consortia interoperability. The report is available on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15227235..

The 2nd NFDI Metadata Workshop shifted the focus from schema selection to the challenges of practical implementation. The central outcome is a first formulation of a NFDI Core Metadata Profile: a schema-agnostic baseline defining a minimal set of required metadata fields that must be populated regardless of the underlying technical format. A number of elements were discussed and afterwards catgorized as mandatory, recommended, and optional The workshop also addressed the inherent limitations of schema mapping (all cross-schema mappings are lossy and use-case specific), presented domain-specific metadata extensions from five NFDI communities, and advanced a layered metadata model combining a shared core with discipline-specific extensions.

A third metadata workshop is already in planning to continue developing the NFDI Core Metadata Profile and to advance discussions on discipline-specific metadata layers.

Reference​

Henzen, C., Neidiger, C., Söding, E., & Trippel, T. (2025). Report on the first NFDI Metadata Workshop. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15227235

Fliegl, H., Henzen, C., Koepler, O., Stervbo, U., Söding, E., & Trippel, T. (2025). Report on the 2nd NFDI Metadata Workshop. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19709639