Dr Oliver Koepler1, Dr Felix Bach2, Dr Johannes Liermann6, Prof Sonja Herres-Pawlis5, Dr Nicole Jung7, Dr Steffen Neumann3, Matthias Razum2, Prof Christoph Steinbeck4
1TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, Hannover, Deutschland, 2FIZ Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Deutschland, 3Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry (IPB), Halle, Deutschland, 4Friedrich-Schiller University Jena, Jena, Deutschland, 5RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Deutschland, 6Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz, Mainz, Deutschland, 7Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Deutschland
Biography:
Oliver Koepler is Head of the Lab Linked Scientific Knowledge at the Leibniz Center for Science and Technology, TIB in Germany. His work centers on the development of semantic services and infrastructures for research data. It also includes the development, curation and standardisation of ontologies. He is one of the Spokespersons of the NFDI4Chem Consortium for chemistry in the German National Research Data Infrastructure. In his role as Spokesperson of the NFDI Section Metadata, Terminologies and Provenance and as a member of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Technical and Semantic Interoperability Task Force he is interested in the topic of semantic interoperability across disciplines, frameworks and beyond. Oliver is an organic chemist by training, but continued his career in the last 20 years in the area of digital libraries, data science and research data infrastructures.
Abstract:
NFDI4Chem, part of Germany’s National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), is transforming data workflows in chemistry by enabling semantic, machine-actionable research data through integrated services and community engagement. Central to its efforts are standards such as ontologies and metadata schemas, which underpin the entire data lifecycle. The consortium curates a collection of chemistry-specific ontologies and organises the annual international Ontologies4Chem Workshop to foster harmonisation across the chemistry ontology community. NFDI4Chem provides a Terminology Service (TS) to support seamless embedding and use of ontologies in tools like Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELNs) and data repositories enabling semantic annotation of chemical entities, reactions, and experimental conditions thus providing full provenance of data generation. ELNs are the core tools in supporting data and metadata creation. They allows researchers to capture, analyse, and document data directly in the lab and to transfer it into a federation of chemistry repositories. These repositories, endorsed by over 30 journals, facilitate publication, long-term archiving and reuse. To promote standardisation in data and metadata, NFDI4Chem developed Minimum Information for Chemical Investigations (MIChI), offering guidelines, data models, and checklists. These are used to ensure data quality across services and are implemented in metadata schemas tailored for chemistry. The metadata of the repository federation is harvested and indexed by the NFDI4Chem Search Service, currently covering around 140,000 datasets. In summary, NFDI4Chem enables semantic workflows from data creation to reuse, paving the way for machine-actionable data and the creation of chemistry knowledge graphs to support future research and AI applications.