Service Portal
What is TS4NFDI?
An overarching research data management across all domains is built upon metadata describing research data and their generation. To make sure that disciplines can create and share a common understanding of the concepts and relations used to describe data, we need terminologies as a formal representation of domain knowledge.
Terminology Services 4 NFDI (TS4NFDI) is a cross-domain service for the provision, curation, development, harmonization, and mapping of terminologies. It aims to facilitate consensus-building and interoperability of services across disciplines to achieve a shared knowledge representation and knowledge engineering framework. The service seeks to integrate and converge individual solutions into a standardized, interoperable, and sustainable architecture.
In order to accomplish these objectives, TS4NFDI provides the following tools: the TS4NFDI Service Portal, a Terminology Service Suite (TSS), an centralised API Gateway, and a mapping service.
About the TS4NFDI Service Portal
The basic service TS4NFDI provides a centralised access point in the form of the TS4NFDI Service Portal. The purpose of the portal is to facilitate the integration, usage and customisation of the TS4NFDI tools into the services of NFDI consortia.
This feature empowers domain experts to tailor the response of the centralised API Gateway or the Terminology Service Suite (TSS) to meet their exact requirements. To enable customisation, an administrator user interface is provided within a dashboard, including a configuration panel.
The configuration panel displays a comprehensive list of all available terminologies from the various terminology services accessed by the API Gateway. These terminologies could be combined and published interminology collectionswhich are provided by and hosted at the TS4NFDI Service Portal.
Tools
Integrating terminology data into other web services, such as annotation services or data repositories, is crucial for generating and handling FAIR data. The Terminology Service Suite (TSS) is a collection of interactive web components (widgets) designed to ease the integration of terminology service functions into third-party applications.
The widgets are built using React and TypeScript and can be used in both React and plain HTML applications. The functionality and arguments are the same for the React and plain HTML versions.
For the acceptance and use of terminology data, it is essential that the data is easily accessible. The TS4NFDI API Gateway is a sophisticated, flexible solution that can make federated calls across multiple terminology services within the NFDI and beyond. It can query all terminology services based on the technology of Ontology Lookup Service (OLS), OntoPortal and Skosmos.
The API output is provided in MOD (Metadata for Ontology Description and Publication) format. In future, the TS4NFDI API Gateway will also provide output in the formats of the OLS, OntoPortal and Skosmos APIs.
Mappings between terminologies are crucial for interoperability within NFDI consortia. The TS4NFDI Mapping service acts as a mapping registry and is based on the software Cocoda. Cocoda is a web application to manage and create mappings between knowledge organization systems, such as classifications, authority files, and thesauri.
Mappings between terminologies are crucial for interoperability within NFDI consortia. The TS4NFDI Mapping service acts as a mapping registry and is based on the software Cocoda. Cocoda is a web application to manage and create mappings between knowledge organization systems, such as classifications, authority files, and thesauri.