NFDI4Energy – National Research Data Infrastructure for Interdisciplinary Energy System Research: Progress Report

As NFDI4Energy, we aim to make data and software the scientific foundation for a sustainable energy future. Good research data management (RDM) in energy system research is key for the interdisciplinary collaboration that is essential to tackle the technical, social, economic, policy, and socio-technical dimensions of the energy transition. By ensuring that research outputs are FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable), RDM will simplify the use of artificial intelligence, shorten innovation cycles, reduce duplications, foster excellent research, and drive the scientific advances needed for a sustainable energy future. We have positioned NFDI4Energy as the central hub for RDM in the energy domain. Halfway through its first funding phase, NFDI4Energy in the NFDI association grew from its 10 original members to 26 members through our active community engagement. We conduct yearly NFDI4Energy Conferences, which bring together researchers, industry partners, public administrative bodies, and societal actors. More than half of the conference participants came from non-funded organizations, thus showing the success of our community work. In addition, through further community work (for example, by booths and keynotes at conferences), we foster the cultural change towards FAIR data in energy system research. Our work in NFDI4Energy is guided by our professional scientific and industrial advisory boards. Concrete showcases have proven to be an effective way to turn RDM concepts and services into success stories and to communicate them throughout the community. For example, one showcase illustrates how FAIR climate policy datasets based on ontology-driven workflows can support quantitative policy effectiveness analyses, e.g., for the upcoming assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Our NFDI4Energy service portfolio integrates services developed by different initiatives. Thereby, it forms the backbone of good RDM in energy system research. By evaluating and adapting these solutions, we built a coherent service portfolio that leverages proven methods while also filling identified RDM gaps. The portfolio is based on a clear sustainable onboarding process to ensure the quality of the services. These services span the entire data lifecycle as follows: the Terminology Service offers searchable access to energy ontologies; RDMO4Energy provides energy-specific data management plan templates; the Open Energy Scenario Bundles allow users to document scenario context and to link studies, models, and data through a knowledge graph; the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) enables semantic description and comparison of publications enhanced with energy-specific ontologies; the Leibniz Data Manager (LDM) federates data upload, data linking with natural language queries, and data exploration; the Open Energy Database provides a data repository using a community-driven metadata schema; and the Open Energy Databus links heterogeneous data across lifecycles via a metadata knowledge graph. The services will be further enhanced in the second part of this funding phase based on community feedback. Through additional showcases, we will illustrate the benefits of the services to our community and further increase their usage. An energy-specific metadata schema and energy-specific ontologies are essential to unlock the full potential of these services and the datasets. For example, better dataset descriptions help to enable the usage of datasets in artificial-intelligence based systems. Therefore, we adopted the Open Energy Ontology (OEO) as the primary domain ontology and contributed new concepts on topics such as long-term scenario modeling. We also established a metadata schema for energy data and synchronized it with the activities in the other NFDI consortia. Research software is a key research artifact in the energy domain. Recognizing that energy system research benefits from research software engineering (RSE), we started an energy research software engineering community. We introduced a metadata schema for energy research software and incorporated software management plan templates into RDMO4Energy. With this work, we contributed to a better connection between the RSE and RDM communities. As NFDI4Energy, we foster the idea of oneNFDI, e.g., by integrating different base services like IAM4NFDI, TS4NFDI, and DMP4NFDI. We contribute to oneNFDI through our support of new service initiatives like nfdi.software, as well as through our active participation in the Conference on Research Data Infrastructure (CoRDI, 2023 & 2025), the NFDI sections, and the NFDI task forces, e.g., on Governance and Sustainability. We collaborate with other NFDI consortia and regularly invite them to our NFDI4Energy Conferences, including active roles, e.g., with keynotes, booths, and workshops. Our collaboration with other NFDI consortia also includes the establishment of Memorandums of Understandings and the preparation of joint calls for flex projects. Through our community work, we have identified additional needs for domain-specific RDM training, which we will address in the next funding phase. There is an increasing demand for reusable, quality-assured, annotated data from academia, public administration, and industry, which we will further concentrate on. In summary, NFDI4Energy has become the central hub for RDM in the energy domain, delivering a dedicated suite of quality-assured services, developing energy-specific metadata and ontologies, integrating existing approaches, and providing showcases as a basis for our successful community work.