Would you like to collaborate with us as an Incubator?

Status

Related Consortia

Duration

6 months somewhere in the future. The next call for incubators is currently open. The submission deadline is on the 9nd January 2026. The next incubator cycle itself will start in the middle of Q1/2026.

Description

Have you considered one or more of the possible goals listed below? However, you may not have the resources or expertise to make it happen. Terminology Services 4 NFDI (TS4NFDI) can provide the assistance you need to bring your use case to life.

We offer incubator projects to interested parties to support them in the interaction, integration or handling of terminology services. TS4NFDI will offer at least two incubator cycles per year. These cycles will be user-driven and will include requirements analysis, service integration, testing and user feedback. Each cycle is expected to span six months, during which TS4NFDI will allocate resources (e.g. developer capacity) to support your specific use case.

Possible Goals

• Hosting of terminologies
• Setup a terminology service
• Adding terminology services to the API Gateway
• Integration of TSS widgets
• Provision of collection(s) via API Gateway
• Adding mappings to the mapping service

RADAR

Status

Duration

From 21.02.2025 To 10.2025

Description

RADAR is a multidisciplinary research data repository operated by FIZ Karlsruhe, offering institutions a secure and user-friendly platform to archive, manage, let peer review and publish research data. With the cost-free and low-threshold publication services RADAR4Chem (for chemistry) and RADAR4Culture (for cultural heritage and humanities), FIZ Karlsruhe provides tailored solutions for discipline-specific research needs based on RADAR and developed in the framework of the NFDI.

WDCC - World Data Center for Climate

Status

Duration

From 26.02.2025 To 10.2025

Description

The WDCC has the mission to archive, disseminate and publish Earth System model data and related data products to support the international climate research community. The WDCC is a discipline specific repository providing active preservation for research only. Therefore WDCC is using common metadata standards and is recommending the usage of community data standards like the Climate Forecast (CF) Conventions. The WDCC is certified by Core Trust Seal (CTS) and an accredited regular member of the World Data System. WDCC is following the FAIR principles - all metadata is openly accessible, the access to the data is free of charge. The WDCC is hosted by the German Climate Computing Center (Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum - DKRZ) in Hamburg.

nmrXiv

Status

Duration

From ~ To ~

Description

While several attempts have been made recently to create NMR databases from literature, they fall short of meeting the needs of modern chemical and related scientific communities. nmrXiv is the first open archive to preserve NMR data in its original instrument format, while offering tools for their analysis and promoting open data and standards for long-term sustainability and accessibility. nmrXiv revolutionizes NMR data management and archival by providing an open-access, standardized, and user-friendly platform. Our platform is public and interoperable to ensure that NMR data is freely accessible, transparent, and reproducible. We support standardized data formats to enhance consistency and facilitate data comparison and integration.

ChEBI - Chemical Entities of Biological Interest

Status

Duration

From 10.02.2025 To 11.2025

Description

Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) is a freely available dictionary of molecular entities focused on ‘small’ chemical compounds. The term ‘molecular entity’ refers to any constitutionally or isotopically distinct atom, molecule, ion, ion pair, radical, radical ion, complex, conformer, etc., identifiable as a separately distinguishable entity. The molecular entities in question are either products of nature or synthetic products used to intervene in the processes of living organisms. ChEBI incorporates an ontological classification, whereby the relationships between molecular entities or classes of entities and their parents and/or children are specified.

Coconut

Status

Duration

From ~ To ~

Description

A comprehensive platform facilitating natural product research by providing data, tools, and services for deposition, curation, and reuse. It aims to provide researchers, scientists, and enthusiasts with comprehensive and easily accessible data on a wide variety of natural compounds. The database includes detailed information on the chemical structures, literature references and sources of these compounds, facilitating research and discovery in natural products.

NFDI4Cat Central Data Repository (Repo4Cat)

Status

Duration

From 12.02.2025 To 10.2025

Description

NFDI4Cat is a community-driven and user-oriented initiative to secure the digital future of catalysis. NFDI4Cat has set up a data repository “Repo4Cat” based on the Dataverse platform (https://repository.nfdi4cat.org/). Due to the lack of catalysis-specific vocabularies and ontologies, NFDI4Cat has also created a community-managed SKOS vocabulary “Voc4Cat” (https://nfdi4cat.github.io/voc4cat/) to provide machine readable term definitions to be used for data annotation and in metadata schemas. Together with TS4NFDI NFDI4Cat wants to provide a better vocabulary browsing and search experience by serving Voc4Cat via Skosmos, a terminology browsing tool specifically optimized for SKOS vocabularies. Moreover, we want to integrate Voc4Cat annotation-widgets in the Repo4Cat data sharing platform in order to improve the metadata entry and interoperability.

BERD Terminology Service

Status

Duration

From 29.05.2024 To 19.11.2024

Description

BERD@NFDI is dedicated to establishing a research data infrastructure transforming the management of Business, Economic, and Related Data. Our mission is to empower researchers of the social sciences with the tools and services needed to harness the full potential of unstructured data, such as images, videos, audio, and text files. BERD Terminology Service provides a single point of access to terminologies and ontologies from Business, Economics and Related fields.

Terminology service for Plasma-MDS

Status

Duration

From ~ To 19.11.2024

Description

The plasma ontology (Plasma-O) is a domain-specific ontology for low-temperature plasma science and technology. It aims to support the standardized documentation and annotation of data and information in this field. The ontology contains classes and properties for the entities which are relevant in typical plasma studies, such as plasma generating devices, media, materials and diagnostic methods.

preVIEW

Status

Duration

From ~ To ~

Description

During the current COVID-19 pandemic, the rapid availability of profound information is crucial in order to derive information about diagnosis, disease trajectory, treatment or to adapt the rules of conduct in public. The increased importance of preprints for COVID-19 research initiated the design of the preprint search engine preVIEW. Conceptually, it is a lightweight semantic search engine focusing on easy inclusion of specialized COVID-19 textual collections and provides a user friendly web interface for semantic information retrieval. In order to support semantic search functionality, we integrated a text mining workflow for indexing with relevant terminologies. Currently, diseases, human genes and SARS-CoV-2 proteins are annotated, and more will be added in future. The system integrates collections from several different preprint servers that are used in the biomedical domain to publish non-peer-reviewed work, thereby enabling one central access point for the users. In addition, our service offers facet searching, export functionality and an API access.

Metadata Annotation Workbench

Status

Duration

From ~ To ~

Description

The Metadata Annotation Workbench is developed in the NFDI4Health project. The service aims to assist researchers with semantic annotation of data dictionaries, questionnaires or other data collection instruments.

Discuss Data

Status

Duration

From 20.02.2025 To 10.2025

Description

Discuss Data (www.discuss-data.net) is an open repository for storing, sharing and discussing research data on Eastern Europe, South Caucasus and Central Asia and is currently building further Community Spaces, for example for the Digital Humanities .The platform, launched in September 2020, is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, Project number 493011772) and operated by the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen (FSO) and the Göttingen State and University Library (SUB). Discuss Data goes beyond ordinary repositories and offers an interactive online platform for the discussion and quality assessment of research data and creates a space for academic communication and for the community-specific publication, curation, annotation and discussion of research data.

Open Energy Platform

Status

Duration

From 20.08.2025 To 02.2026

Description

NFDI4Energy is developing a platform that integrates key services to support researchers in the energy domain. Central components are accessible through the Open Energy Platform (OEP). A core element is the Open Energy Ontology (OEO), a dynamic domain ontology for energy system modeling. Additional complementary ontologies are currently in development to broaden the semantic framework.

ICONCLASS

Status

Duration

From 03.09.2025 To 02.2026

Description

Adding support for the globally used cultural heritage subject classification system iconclass.org to the Terminology Services 4 NFDI. This will allow Iconclass to be selected as a base data source, and to allow other systems to make use of the TS4NFDI hierarchy and graph widgets for visualization and as navigation aids.

Ontology of the historical German-language nomenclature

Status

Duration

From 14.08.2025 To 02.2026

Description

The Ontology of the historical German-language nomenclature for offices and professions (OhdAB) provides classifications according to job profiles and requirement levels based on the "Classification of Occupations 2010/2020" (KldB 2010) for historical professions. The OhdAB is maintained and curated within FactGrid. FactGrid is an instance of Wikibase.

Health Study Hub

Status

Duration

From 11.08.2025 To 02.2026

Description

The Health Study Hub is a central discovery platform developed within the NFDI4Health initiative. It provides structured metadata about health studies, enabling researchers, scientists, and other stakeholders to explore and understand available research data without requiring direct access to sensitive datasets. The Hub emphasizes metadata transparency, interoperability, and usability, supporting FAIR data principles and promoting responsible data reuse.

DALIA Search Portal

Status

Duration

From 08.08.2025 To 02.2026

Description

DALIA stands for the “Data Literacy Alliance” which develops a user-centric search platform according to the FAIR principles in order to offer high quality search results for educational resources from and for the RDM and data literacy community. Knowledge graph and semantic technologies are used to offer “FAIR data usage and supply” including offers for best practices, open educational resources, and learning paths.

TS4NDSI integration in Galaxy

Status

Duration

From 03.2026 To 09.2026

Description

To strengthen FAIR data practices and semantic interoperability within research tools and workflows, we propose to integrate Galaxy with the TS4NFDI Terminology Service. This integration will allow Galaxy datatype definitions to be annotated with standardized concepts from the EDAM ontology, accessed dynamically through TS4NFDI. By linking Galaxy datatypes to persistent ontology identifiers, researchers will be supported in selecting, interpreting, and reusing data in a more transparent and interoperable way. As a demonstrator, we will extend a subset of Galaxy datatype descriptors with references to EDAM terms served via TS4NFDI. When users interact with these datatypes in Galaxy, they will be able to view the corresponding ontology concepts and their definitions directly within the platform via the TS4nfdi widgets. Workflows and outputs will then carry these semantic annotations forward, enabling improved provenance tracking, automated metadata enrichment, and easier integration with NFDI services. This work will demonstrate how Galaxy can adopt shared terminology infrastructures to lower barriers to FAIR data compliance and enable consistent, domain-appropriate semantic annotation across research communities.

AIMS

Status

Duration

From 03.2026 To 09.2026

Description

AIMS (Applying Interoperable Metadata Standards) is developing a platform for creating, sharing, and reusing interoperable and machine-readable metadata profiles based on SHACL shapes. The project addresses key challenges in research data management by enabling researchers to model semantic metadata schemas in a modular and hierarchical fashion using elements from established controlled terminologies. AIMS provides a central web-UI for managing profiles, backed by repositories for storing validated metadata sets and integrating with electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) like eLabFTW and openBIS. The project consortium includes ULB Darmstadt, RWTH Aachen IT Center, University of Rostock, Fraunhofer IWM, and University of Freiburg.

Integrate TS4NFDI into DMP4NFDI RDMO Service

Status

Duration

From 03.2026 To 09.2026

Description

DMP4NFDI provides the DMP tool RDMO for NFDI consortia and develops the DMP Template Framework to ensure interoperability across different DMP services in NFDI. Vocabularies, terminologies and ontologies already play an important role in the data management planning process. Our goal for this project is to integrate the TS4NFDI service into the RDMO interview section, allowing users to choose items from predefined vocabularies. We are collaborating with the FAIRagro consortium to make community standards available within their templates.

Enabling Semantic Interoperability via DataCite Terminologies

Status

Duration

From 03.2026 To 09.2026

Description

This incubator project aims to host the DataCite metadata model and controlled vocabularies within the TIB Terminology Services (TS) infrastructure and expose them through the TS4NFDI API Gateway. The goal is to provide a canonical, machine-actionable representation of DataCite terms, including stable URIs, labels, definitions, and versioning, that can be reused consistently across NFDI services and beyond. Rather than introducing a new ontology for metadata, the project operationalises an existing, widely adopted metadata standard inside the TS ecosystem, enabling downstream propagation to TS4NFDI services and client applications. In this way other services such as ELNs, DMPs or other data repositories could use the well-established DataCite terms through the API Gateway and the widgets of the Terminology Service Suite. In addition, the project will establish and maintain curated mappings between DataCite vocabularies and related schemas such as schema.org and DCAT, using the TS4NFDI mapping service. These centrally managed mappings will be provided via the mapping service to support semantic interoperability without requiring hard-coded, system-specific alignments across different knowledge domains.

Metabase

Status

Duration

From 03.2026 To 09.2026

Description

Metabase is the central metadata service for the research data management container (RDMC) developed in the NFDIxCS consortium. As metadata is highly heterogeneous in different fields of computer science, the service incorporates a repository for community-specific metadata vocabularies (schemas) defined as OWL2 ontologies. Metadata of an RDMC can thus be expressed in one of these vocabularies, and the Metabase service uses the underlying ontology to automatically check for inconsistencies, as well as to enrich the supplied metadata with derived facts. To enable metadata-aware services in NFDIxCS (e.g., for finding RDMCs), Metabase can also export the metadata in various forms, for instance as an open research knowledge graph (ORKG). Further, Metabase allows to define morphisms to translate between vocabularies and bridge the gap between metadata of different communities.

MathModDB

Status

Duration

From 03.2026 To 09.2026

Description

MathModDB is a database of mathematical models, developed by the Mathematical Research Data Initiative (MaRDI) as an ontology and knowledge graph. Its aim is to store information of mathematical models in a structured way, describing a mathematical model as a semantic object. A model consists, for example, of mathematical expressions and quantities, and can be linked with a specific computational task. Moreover, a mathematical model is used to model a specific research problem, embedded in an academic discipline.

FAIRagro Terminology Service

Status

Duration

From 03.2026 To 09.2026

Description

The main purpose of the incubator project is a strong integration of TS4NFDI services with FAIRagro products and services. This includes the following concrete project objectives: 1)Automatic instantiation and updating of a FAIRagro Terminology Service Instance based on the FAIRagro Standards Inventory, 2) Implementation of mappings (preferably using the SciWin workflow engine developed in FAIRagro) for terminologies that are not yet available in a form directly usable for consumption by the TS4NFDI infrastructure, by map terminology distribution files in different formats to e.g. SKOS thesauri that can be used in a backend Skosmos service and 3) Demonstration of use of the TS4NFDI instance in selected FAIRagro products.

Semantic and Interoperable Metadata Integration for ELN Objects

Status

Duration

From Q3/2026 To -

Description

This incubator integrates the DataCite metadata properties and controlled vocabularies into core ELN workflows in RSpace enabling researchers to enrich metadata early in the research lifecycle and export interoperable records to repositories. In collaboration with PID4NFDI, controlled vocabularies will be exposed via the TS4NFDI API gateway and made available in RSpace through integration of TS4NFDI widgets. The incubator prototypes a user friendly and robust way of curating RSpace ELN object metadata and set the foundation for interoperable ELN objects using one of the NFDI endorsed metadata standards.

Integration of ontology-based auto-completion in NFDI4Immuno Excel metadata templates

Status

Duration

From Q3/2026 To -

Description

NFDI4Immuno works with various standardized terminologies and ontologies to describe immunological data and its metadata. Currently, future users of the NFDI4Immuno Excel template are required to manually enter relevant terminologies and ontology terms into the corresponding metadata fields.

SensorCV

Status

Duration

From Q3/2026 To -

Description

The Sensor Management System (SMS) serves as a central infrastructure for collecting and managing sensor metadata for scientific projects across four Helmholtz Centers (GFZ, UFZ, FZJ, and KIT). To ensure metadata consistency across different SMS-instances, an independent but central Controlled Vocabulary (CV) Service provides curated terms for attributes such as device types, units, and measured quantities. The project aims to modernize the SMS-CV architecture by transforming it from an SMS-specific solution into an integrated component within the NFDI ecosystem, especially useful within the Earth System Science community (NFDI4Earth) and beyond.