NAB XVIII 2019

Current Affairs
Digital Solutions for
the Cluster
of Excellence
Cyrus Samimi is the
Vice Dean of the Digital Solutions
team. Photo: Sabine Greiner
Research Data Management and the creation of a Knowledge Information System
for the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence are the key tasks of a newly
created department.
Text TEAM DIGITAL SOLUTIONS
The importance of research data that has
been gathered with great expenditure
of time and resources by the individual
scholar and its impact in interdisciplinary
re-use in the scientific community
has been a topic in German science policy
at least since 2008. In that year, the Alliance
of German Science Organisations
published its “Principles for the Handling
of Research Data”. Viewing research data
as a valuable resource, there has been
an ever-increasing demand on universities
for more accessibility, sharing and
the long-term availability of gathered
research data. Among the different academic
disciplines, the awareness of and
openness to these new developments is
far from a shared understanding, due to
differing conceptions of what the term
“data” itself means or implies. Nevertheless,
the submission of a Research Data
Management Plan along with a research
project proposal, e.g., when applying
for funding from the German Research
Foundation (DFG), is about to become a
standard procedure.
Although these developments started
22
about ten years ago and there are European
institutions wholly devoted to the
topic of Research Data Management and
its procedures, like the Digital Curation
Centre in Edinburgh, similar efforts at
German universities are a very recent
development. The University of Bayreuth
established a Research Data Management
Team only in 2017, and the Digital
Solutions Team (DST) of the Africa
Multiple Cluster of Excellence has been
active only since 2019. The latter, comprising
four Data Curators headed by
the Vice Dean, Cyrus Samimi, professor
of climatology, is the contact point between
the Cluster and the IT Team for
the Africa-related research of the Cluster
of Excellence. The DST has developed a
Research Data Management Plan and issued
a first version of its Research Data
Management Guidelines.
Building a knowledge
information system
Apart from these “classic” activities, one
of the most challenging objectives of
the DST, in close cooperation with Stefan
Jablonski, Chair for Databases and
Information Systems, and his team, is
building a knowledge information system
as a graph-based database for the
storage of the research data gathered
within the Cluster of Excellence and other
Africa-related projects. This data can
be stored in a system architecture that
is meaningful because the data does not
exist in “scholarly isolation”, but becomes
rich through structure, consistency, and
descriptive metadata.
After extensive research in 2019, a decision
was made in favour of the open
source system WissKI, a German acronym
for “Wissenschaftliche KommunikationsInfrastruktur”,
which can be
translated as Scientific Communication
Infrastructure. The Virtual Research Environment
based on the content management
system Drupal is a flexible tool for
data collections that provides the benefits
of semantic web technology. The WissKI
system shall fulfil, as far as the data allows
for it, the FAIR principles of findability,
accessibility, interoperability, and
the reuse of digital assets. The aspect of
interoperability with research data from
the African Cluster Centres and database
systems run on their account is, in particular,
one of the major tasks in trying to
avoid a digital North-South divide.