At the DFG review meeting on 03 December 2025 in Bonn, NFDI-MatWerk was represented by Chris Eberl, Tilmann Hickel, Marius Politze, Harald Sack, and Ruth Schwaiger. Following an official invitation by the DFG, the consortium presented its proposal alongside DAPHNE4NFDI and FAIRmat and defended the planned work program in front of an international panel of reviewers.

The presentation was followed by a detailed discussion, with questions addressing both scientific priorities and concrete aspects of implementation. Reviewers engaged in particular with the planned transition of services, governance structures, and technical solutions. A subsequent poster session provided additional space for direct technical exchange. In this setting, NFDI-MatWerk focused on hands-on discussions and live demonstrations of selected services, enabling reviewers to explore concrete use cases and technical approaches in more depth.

The proposed program for the second funding period marks a clear shift from a demonstration phase toward a community-wide rollout. It is aligned with emerging technologies and evolving use cases in materials science and engineering. Key elements include the systematic inclusion and empowerment of stakeholders to support sustainable culture change, the further development of a federated infrastructure for interoperable (meta)data, and the use of semantic descriptions combined with AI-supported interoperability. In addition, the proposal addresses frameworks for developing, executing, and sharing AI-based workflows and digital lab environments, as well as processes for defining and implementing materials data quality criteria. These activities are embedded in a broader strategic approach to advancing the digital transformation of materials science and engineering within the National Research Data Infrastructure.

NFDI-MatWerk acknowledges the sustained effort of the entire consortium team that contributed to the preparation and presentation of the proposal.

The full proposal is available on Zenodo.