TA4: FAIR Data for Energy System Research

Lead: OFFIS

Description and Objectives

This Task Area will lay the foundations for a collaborative research environment for the energy research community that fosters FAIR and reusable research. To this end, metadata standards and ontologies will be developed and the NFDI4Energy research infrastructure will be supported in this aspect with the work in this Task Area. Measure 4.1 addresses the creation of a domain ontology for energy system research, which serves as controlled vocabulary in the development of metadata standards for research data in Measure 4.3 and as the basis for the development of ontologies for scenarios and distributed simulations in Measure 4.2 and Measure 5.2, respectively. With the establishment of the research infrastructure, NFDI4Energy takes an extensible approach to manage and share data, publications and other types of DOs in research and their interdependencies from energy system projects. This TA implements a range of core services for this purpose, namely the metadata Registry, the research knowledge graph and the terminology and PID services. Together they form a semantic layer for integrating, linking and structuring DOs in research. The function of the semantic layer is to enable interoperability and to integrate the components and standards from this Task Area and TA5 with the NFDI4Energy platform developed in TA1. By storing metadata of DOs, including PIDs and links to the repository, the metadata Registry will be a means to integrate external repositories and will provide a source for the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG). The ORKG in turn supports interoperable analysis of research (meta-)data, e.g. scenario comparison.

Task Area 4 targets the following objectives:

  • [O4.1] Create a domain ontology for energy system research
  • [O4.2] Provide a rich set of high-quality community-agreed metadata standards covering a broad spectrum of DOs of energy system research
  • [O4.3] Implement a metadata registry for various DOs in research
  • [O4.4] Create a PID-based process to register DOs in the metadata Registry based on useful metadata standards and terminologies
  • [O4.5] Support interdisciplinary work in energy system research based on the developed community services