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09/05/2025

The 2nd Conference on Research Data Infrastructre (CoRDI) by the NFDI association started with a warm welcome by the director, York Sure-Vetter in person, and the German Federal Minister of Research, Technology and Space, Dorothee Bär, via a video message. Also, the DFG, the EOSC, and others, like the host of the event, the Werkezeugmaschinenlabor (WZL) of RWTH Aachen University, opened the event with kind words. Finally, a surprise experiment conducted by Sonja Herres-Pawlis of NFDI4Chem and RWTH Aachen kicked off CoRDI 2025 with a bang.

Over the course of three days, more than 600 participants delved into various infrastructure challenges, as well as teaching and education aspects. It was a chance to consolidate as one NFDI and reflect on what has gone well so far and what common challenges all consortia face. Multiple parallel sessions in different formats covered not only the technical background, but also provided insights from the perspecitve of people and culture.

Several members of NFDI-MatWerk were present. Highlights for NFDI-MatWerk include

a Poster with a Pitch by Georg Winkens (FZ Jülich) for the NFDI-MatWerk Roll-out group concept
a Ligthning talk by Ebrahim Norouzi (FIZ and KIT) on the NFDI-MatWerk Ontology and the Knowledge Graph
the NFDI-MatWerk Infrastructure Use Case Demonstrators, presented by Abril Guzmán Azócar (FZ Jülich) and Khalil Reijiba (RWTH Aachen)
and a joint talk with NFDI4Ing and NDI4Chem with the NFDI-MatWerk spokesperson Chris Eberl (Fraunhofer IWM).

The event was further a great opportunity to connect with the German Research Data Infrastructure landscape: with other consortia, NFDI sections and association, other RDM initiatives like FIDs, data competence centres and state initiative as well as institutional efforts like the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC) during the poster session and the market of consortia. It was also a good opportunity for the NFDI-MatWerk members present on-site in Aachen to reflect together on the input and discuss possible implications for the work of our consortium.

A fishbowl discussion with DFG in the evening plenary session highlighted the importance of user acceptance of our NFDI’s research data infrastructure.
Another highlight for many was for sure the delightful evening event at the WZL, featuring informative lab tours with all kind of robots, music and a barbecue, allowing participants to enjoy Aachen and connect further.

NFDI-MatWerk’s conference contributions can be found on our Zenodo community: https://zenodo.org/communities/nfdi-matwerk/records?q=&l=list&p=1&s=10

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