Work programme

The work programme of NFDI consortia is divided into Task Areas (TAs), which may consist of different Measures (M). Below are listed and shortly described the Task Areas and Measures of NFDI4Microbiota’s work programme.

TA1 – Community, Networking & Training

This TA is dedicated to engaging the diverse NFDI4Microbiota target communities, and building and strengthening a network of mutual support and constructive feedback. To this end, the consortium will establish the following Measures (M):

  • M1.1 – Training and Education: workshops, trainings and documentation.
  • M1.2 – Support: support for submitting and analyzing data.
  • M1.3 – Community Outreach and Public Relations: promoting NFDI4Microbiota mission and usage, and fostering community acceptance.
  • M1.4 – Connection to other NFDI Consortia: developing joint use cases and organizing joint events.
  • M1.5 – Connection to international partners: developing microbiome standards.
  • M1.6 – Sustainability: guaranteeing the long-term usage and maintenance of NFDI4Microbiota.
  • M1.7 – Use Cases: supporting cutting-edge scientific projects.

TA2 – Standards & Policies

This TA is dedicated to facilitating and stimulating data sharing and re-use by supporting easy and open access to microbial and associated data, following the FAIR data principles. To this end, the consortium will establish the following Measures (M):

  • M2.1 – Data & Metadata Standards: promoting the use of relevant data and metadata requirements.
  • M2.2 – Experimental Procedure Standards: promoting the use of appropriate experimental protocols.
  • M2.3 – Workflow Standards: promoting the use of suitable analytical approaches.
  • M2.4 – Policies and legal issues for data management and re-use: ensuring open access, reproducibility, consistency, transparency, and interoperability.

TA3 – Services

This TA is dedicated to implementing, in the NFDI4Microbiota platform, the service offer for data access and analyses intended for the microbiology community. The final goal being to make research more standardized and reproducible.

  • M3.1 – Central web portal: centralized access to NFDI4Microbiota services.
  • M3.2 – Analytical services: developing and maintaining workflows.
  • M3.3 – Databases & Terminology Services: supporting database development and best practices.
  • M3.4 – Data Quality & Provenance Services: laying the groundwork for interpretable, comparable and valid research results.
  • M3.5 – Data Deposition & Repositories: fostering best practices for depositing data in repositories.
  • M3.6 – Long-term preservation: raising awareness about and promoting the standardized long-term preservation of metadata.
  • M3.7 – Reviewing/Commenting System for Data: gathering feedback to adjust the NFDI4Microbiota platform to researchers’ needs.
  • M3.8 – Systems biology, modeling, and multi-omics integration: developing mechanisms for mapping linkages between different data types and inter-omic integration between reference databases and the NFDI4Microbiota system.
  • M3.9 – Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN): fostering the use and educating about ELNs.

TA4 – Technical Infrastructure

This TA is dedicated to providing the technical foundations for the NFDI4Microbiota platform on which compute and storage resources for the microbiology community will be offered. To this end, the consortium will establish the following Measures (M):

  • M4.1 – Computational Infrastructure Operations: providing and maintaining a suitable, scalable, high-performance, cloud-based compute infrastructure.
  • M4.2 – Data Storage Platform: providing a platform for scalable and accessible data storage.
  • M4.3 – Infrastructure Software Components: providing common computational frameworks for analytical and storage services.
  • M4.4 – Service Monitoring & Reporting: actively integrating direct and indirect user feedback into the development of the platform.

TA5 – Coordination & Communication

This TA is dedicated to coordinating all the other TAs, and delivering a sustainable plan for the implementation of the FAIR data principles and open science concepts in microbiota-related systems. To this end, the consortium will establish the following Measures (M):

  • M5.1 – Project governance
  • M5.2 – Project financial controlling and reporting
  • M5.3 – Dynamic adaptation and growth