Brief Report | 17. May 2022

Forum „(Further) development of Research Tools & Data Services in NFDI4Culture“ – Report

tools lying on a wooden table

Tools on table

"tools lying on a wooden table" CC0 Creator: Fleur

On November 30, 2021, the first forum "(Further) Development of Research Tools; Data Services" took place. In a three-hour virtual meeting, about 100 scientists, tool and infrastructure developers came together to discuss and evaluate nine proposed projects to be funded by NFDI4Culture and to be made available to the community.

Following the call of the German Council for Scientific Information Infrastructures (RfII) to build a science-led NFDI, the so-called FlexFunds of the Research Tools and Data Services Task Area are awarded through a process based on the needs of the NFDI4Culture community. In the fall of 2021, a call was published to report needs and proposals for further development, adaptation, consolidation, expansion, or even new development of research tools and services. In this first of four funding years, nine tools, services, and frameworks were proposed from various disciplines in the NFDI4Culture community, many of which are or may be relevant across disciplines. During the forum on November 30, the tools and the necessary measures were presented and discussed in the community concerning their usefulness, their importance for scientific work, possible linkage among each other, but also their sustainability.

The results of the forum were analyzed. Measures that address a need of the community, for which there is no alternative free software, that can be developed sustainably and that can be implemented within a FlexFunds project were proposed to the Culture Steering Board for funding.

Fortunately, the proposal was approved and thus the following proposed activities can be funded:

  • CollAna, collation tool for prints
  • ConedaKor, documentation/optimization open source graph database system
  • HistStadt4D, conception implementation prototype
  • kompakkt, Optimization 3D-Viewer and Annotation
  • OpenRefine, data cleansing knowledge databases
  • TOSCA, modeling of application structures

Over four years, a total of about 400,000 Euros will be distributed through the forum "(Further) Development of Research Tools; Data Services" for the needs-based improvement of the tool and infrastructure landscape of our community.