NFDI4DataScience aims to establish a community-driven research data infrastructure for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. In this regard, it focuses on several types of data and artifacts established within the community, including publications, data, models and code.

Transparency, reproducibility and fairness have become crucial challenges

Prof. Reimund Neugebauer, President of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, says: “Data is a crucial raw material for scientific work and serves as the basis for new developments and solutions. The National Research Data Infrastructure provides the entire German science system with access to valuable scientific and research data resources. This sustainably strengthens the innovative power of Germany as a research location and our position in international competition. The Joint Science Conference’s decision to fund the NFDI4DataScience consortium will advance the fields of artificial intelligence and data science, which are strategically important to our future, in a targeted and visionary manner.”

Dr. Sonja Schimmler, Spokesperson of the consortium, says: “We are very happy about the acceptance of the consortium. With NFDI4DataScience we intend to put forward the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence community in academia, which is an interdisciplinary field rooted in Computer Science. Our aim is to reuse existing solutions, and to collaborate closely with the other NFDI consortia and beyond.”

NFDI4DataScience will support all steps of the interdisciplinary research data lifecycle, including collecting/creating, processing, analysing, publishing, archiving and reusing resources in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. The past years have seen a paradigm shift, with computational methods increasingly relying on data-driven and often deep learning-based approaches, leading to the establishment and ubiquity of Data Science as a discipline driven by advances in the field of Computer Science but being of relevance to most scientific disciplines. Transparency, reproducibility and fairness have become crucial challenges for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence due to the complexity of contemporary Data Science methods, often relying on a combination of code, models and data used for training.

NFDI4DataScience is coordinated by Fraunhofer FOKUS and brings together 15 partners. The consortium partners are:

• German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)
• Fraunhofer FOKUS
• Fraunhofer FIT
• FIZ Karlsruhe
• GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
• Hamburger Informatik Technologie-Center e.V. (HITeC)
• Leibniz University Hannover
• Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics
• RWTH Aachen University
• TIB Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology
• TU Berlin
• TU Dresden
• University Leipzig
• ZB MED Information Centre for Life Sciences
• ZBW Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

About the National Research Data Infrastructure

The National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) aims to systematically develop, sustainably secure and make the data sets of science and research accessible, as well as networking them (inter-)nationally. It is currently being set up in a process driven by science as a networked structure of individually acting consortia. The NFDI will be established in three stages over a period of three years. In each of the three stages, new consortia can be admitted to the NFDI in a science-led application process. The Federal Government and the federal states intend to fund up to 30 consortia in total. In the final stage, up to 90 million euros per year will be available for funding.