NFDI4Earth is the NFDI consortium for the Earth System Sciences (ESS) in Germany. It brings together partners from universities, research institutions and public authorities to advance the current state of the art on FAIR research information resources for the Earth System Sciences. NFDI4Earth offers several software artefacts to improve the findability of research outcomes in the Earth System Sciences. Relevant to EOSC Data Commons is the NFDI4Earth Knowledge Hub, a knowledge graph of ESS information resources (e.g., repositories, organisations, metadata standards, datasets, data services, research software, and vocabularies). The NFDI4Earth Knowledge Hub is currently released under an open license (CC BY 4.0) and accessible over a SPARQL endpoint.
Use Case Status Before Joining EOSC Data Commons
The NFDI4Earth features the different types of research information resources; however, it lacks domain-specific observations. As of 2025, NFDI4Earth efforts are directed towards expanding the current knowledge graph with these observations (e.g., observations from the hydrological domain about catchments).
Objectives in the Project
- Improve the FAIRness of climate observations: the use case will provide an automated pipeline for creating FAIR climate change data, using Semantic Web Technologies (i.e. the RDF model and vocabularies / ontologies) to automatically turn open climate data into knowledge graphs;
- Facilitate automated question answering about climate observations.
Integration with EOSC Data Commons Services and Components
EOSC Matchmaker is the most relevant service for the NFDI4Earth use case, because the knowledge graph for climate observations can be used as input for crawling (e.g., through a REST interface), federated search over multiple graphs (SPARQL endpoint) or dynamic link discovery (portions of the graph in RDF).
Technical Integration Plan
First knowledge graph of climate observations available, along with the automated conversion pipeline for Germany as well as question answering on the knowledge graph of country-wide observations (proof of concept).
Second prototype available, illustrating the automated conversion pipeline for Germany as well as question answering on the knowledge graph of European observations. Updated technical infrastructure based on proof-of concept feedback.
Updated knowledge graph of climate observations. Updated technical infrastructure for the reuse of the knowledge graph in EOSC Data commons, based on the first release feedback.