Speaker
Description
FAIRmat provides research data management concepts and solutions for the field of solid-state physics. Its NOMAD portal has developed mature concepts and technological solutions for storing data according to the FAIR principles for selected theoretical and experimental data. Generalizing this approach is challenging due to the field’s diversity and complexity and due to missing standards.
In this presentation we present our comprehensive approach to establish FAIR data in the field of experimental solid-state physics despite its heterogeneity. The concept includes elaboration of standards, community building and methods that facilitate the community’s transition to FAIR standards. This includes our ongoing effort to establish a coherent ontology-based description, the FAIRmat-NeXus proposal, which is shared by the scientific community, but also by the instrument manufacturers.
The research data cycle typically starts with the planning of the experiment. At this stage, NOMAD CAMELS provides a low-threshold solution for configuring instrument control software instead of coding. Not only it simplifies the experimental protocol, it provides metadata-rich research data output along community-defined standards. Once the data are collected in an experiment, they can be straightforwardly fed into NOMAD Oasis, a local copy of NOMAD that can be tailored to serve the specific needs of individual labs. On this platform, one can work with the data, provide analyses and use it as local repository, with the option of transferring it to the world-wide NOMAD repository, where interoperability and finally a reuse of the data is prepared.
Hence, we establish solutions for the entire research data cycle. However, the complexity of solid-state physics imposes challenges. That is why we are actively promoting the establishment of data literacy in physics curricula with successful examples.