On November 25 and 26, this year’s annual retreat of FAIRagro Task Area 4 “Infrastructure Services” took place at the Thünen Institute in Braunschweig under the leadership of Matthias Lange.
Representatives from the four other task areas in the consortium and from the Leibniz Institute of Vegetable and Ornamental Crops (Leibniz-Institut für Gemüse- und Zierpflanzenbau, IGZ), which joined the group of participants in October with a new Use Case, were also invited and present.
TA4 essentially implements the necessary components and central infrastructure services of the federated RDM along a FAIR-enabled research data lifecycle, which is made accessible via the FAIRagro portal. This task includes providing the central FAIRagro services, implementing the technical requirements for data integration workflows and infrastructure services, and linking data repositories and making them searchable.
Over the two days, 25 infrastructure experts and users presented the infrastructure services for FAIRagro developed and already in operation in TA4. Furthermore, services currently in test operation were analyzed technically and conceptually and the roadmap for their production launch was discussed with the users in FAIRagro. Highlights were the partial live presentation of the project infrastructure, the prototypes of the middleware, the SciWin client, the search portal and the middleware as well as the breakout sessions with the use cases and on data quality issues with TA3.
Matthias Lange: “It was particularly nice to see that the experts involved in TA4 Infrastructure Services have grown together to form a joint team and have switched to an efficient, cross-institute working mode. All colleagues live the engineering spirit that puts the solution at the center. I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks for the commitment of my colleagues, as well as for the input of the other task areas: this close cooperation is essential for success. I think we can look forward to the coming year with great confidence and look forward to further productive infrastructure services.”
Robin Tim Biermann attended as a representative of IGZ: “As a new member of FAIRagro, the TA4 retreat was a great opportunity to gain an in-depth insight into the middleware and get to know the dedicated people behind the tools. The presentations and discussions on the individual components of the middleware made it clear to me how our use case pilot at IGZ can be embedded in the existing FAIRagro structures and how we can actively contribute to the further development of the consortium.”
By the way: the importance of the social component for the FAIRagro consortium was demonstrated in this context by the very interesting city tour by Jens Krumsieck (Thünen Institute, FAIRagro Measure 4.4) on the first evening and, of course, the subsequent dinner in the highly recommended restaurant “Stadtkind” …