Common Infrastructures (INFRA)
The Section Common Infrastructures addresses the challenges of building shared, interoperable technical services that span NFDI consortia. Its working groups develop solutions for data integration, identity management, persistent identifiers, long-term preservation, electronic lab notebooks, data management planning, research software engineering, and more. The section acts as a coordination hub ensuring that infrastructure components developed across consortia are compatible, reusable, and aligned with FAIR principles.
This section documents shared services and technical building blocks enabling FAIR data across NFDI.
Use this page as the entry point for infrastructure topics, services, and operations.
Section Goals
- Networking of infrastructure components for shared use: the identification, conception and division of labor in the development of jointly usable infrastructure components and their interoperability.
- Research Data Commons - a commons for research data: The creation of a multi-cloud-based infrastructure that can be used by consortia to exchange and share data, software, and compute resources.
- Sustainable structures: The establishment of sustainable structures for technology partnerships within the NFDI in order to organize the provision of shared information infrastructures in the long term.
Section Leadership
| Role | Name | Institution | Term |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spokesperson | Prof. Dr. Sonja Schimmler | Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V./ TU Berlin | (2021 - ongoing) |
| Deputy Spokesperson | Dr. Marius Politze | RWTH Aachen University | (2026 - ongoing) |
| Deputy Spokesperson | Dr. Michael Diepenbroek | Universität Bremen, GFBio e.V. | (2021 - 2026) |
Working Groups
| Working Group | Short | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| Overall Architecture | OA | Federated blueprint for NFDI infrastructure |
| Data Integration | DI | Scalable methods for integrating heterogeneous data |
| Data Management Planning | DMP | Coordination of DMP tools and templates |
| Data Science and Artificial Intelligence | DSAI | FAIR digital objects, reproducible data analysis |
| Electronic Lab Notebooks | ELN | ELN evaluation, selection and deployment |
| Identity and Access Management and Accounting | IAM | Federated digital identities, access control, and accounting |
| Infrastructure and Data Security | IDS | GDPR compliance and information security |
| Long-term Access and Preservation | LTA | Long-term archiving of data and software |
| Multi-Cloud | MC | Federated multi-cloud architecture and IAM |
| Persistent Identifiers | PID | PID services aligned with FAIR principles |
| Research Software Engineering | RSE | Software infrastructure across NFDI consortia |
Further Information
Section Charter: https://zenodo.org/records/15000221