NFDI4Chem Terminology Service V2.0 is Launched

Interested in ontologies in the field of chemistry or closely related disciplines? Then you should definitely take a closer look at our redesigned NFDI4Chem Terminology Service (TS) in its new version 2.0!

The NFDI4Chem TS is a repository for chemistry and chemistry-related ontologies and an essential part for semantic data annotation services. It acts as a single point of access to the latest ontology versions with comprehensive information about their scope, application, and curators. The redesigned web interface and API provides improved usability for both human users and other services or tools, which can embed the ontologies in their own workflows.

From a technical perspective, the release of version 2.0 separated the EBI-OLS based backend from the newly developed frontend, which uses the React library. Newly implemented frontend features include an improved term search with autocomplete function, a redesigned tree view and a streamlined ontology list from which all important information and metrics are now directly visible.

Ontologies of interest can easily be downloaded in both OWL and JSON formats with just one click. Planned upcoming future releases will extend the Terminology Service beyond the provision of ontologies, to also support curation workflows.

NFDI4Chem Search Service is Live

Next step taken towards a FAIR research data infrastructure in chemistry.

You are looking for datasets in the context of chemistry and are tired of searching countless repositories one by one? Then our new NFDI4Chem Search Service is exactly what you need!

The NFDI4Chem Search Service is live now. It is developed and maintained by TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, provides an overarching search in the various chemistry and chemistry-related repositories of the NFDI4Chem federation. For this purpose, the Search Service collects the metadata of currently more than 90,000 datasets from the linked repositories and thus offers a central entry point, e.g. to get an overview of all different spectra measured for certain molecular entities.

You can filter data records by different criteria, such as source repository or measurement technique. The advanced search enables you to search for chemical identifiers, such as InChI, InChI Key, SMILES. Once found, the original datasets in the connected repositories can be easily accessed directly via the provided link.

NFDI4Chem at NFDI Info Event at Uni Hannover

On November 2, NFDI@LUH, the first information event about NFDI at Leibniz Universität Hannover (LUH), took place. 

In addition to five other consortia, TIB presented NFDI4Chem and the services for Chemistry at Leibniz Universität Hannover. The poster exhibition was an excellent opportunity to discuss with resident researchers, students and representatives of LUH institutes.

More information is available here (in German).

If you want to know more about our outreach activities, take a look at the conference train.

NFDI4Chem Terminology Service Online

The NFDI4Chem Terminology Service release 1.0 has been launched!

FAIR data principles call for rich metadata using a formal, accessible, shared, and broadly applicable language for knowledge representation. Natural language words and phrases are ambiguous, which makes annotating data with their meanings difficult. Here we can achieve a significant improvement by applying domain-specific terminologies which allow us to unambiguously annotate data. Standardised vocabularies mapped across the various disciplines enable real data interoperability, discovery and exploitation beyond our own domain. The NFDI4Chem Terminology Service provides such chemistry-specific terminologies, thus enabling researchers and software or services of NFDI4Chem to create machine- and human-readable descriptions of research data.

A first use case of the NFDI4Chem Terminology Service is the annotation of experimental descriptions in the chemotion ELN with terms of name reactions from the RXNO ontology. RXNO provides a controlled vocabulary to unambiguously describe applied reactions. Similarly, data repositories can use the Terminology Service to support the semantic annotation of research data during the upload process.

The NFDI4Chem release 1.0 was launched at the end of June 2021. It will provide machine-readable and human-readable descriptions of 19 ontologies which have been identified to be useful for NFDI4Chem. Future developments will include more ontologies, features and additional tools for terminology curation and development.

If you have any suggestions for terminologies / ontologies to be added or if you are interested in joining NFDI4Chem ontology activities, please contact us.

NFDI4Chem Helpdesk is live

The NFDI4Chem Helpdesk, the first service of the NFDI4Chem is live!

The  Helpdesk team is the first point of contact for all questions regarding the NFDI4Chem initiative as well as questions about research data management (RDM) in chemistry, services of NFDI4Chem or NFDI, Data Repositories, Electronic Lab notebooks (ELN) in general and in particular (e.g. “Chemotion”). The First Level Support team of TIB – Leibniz Information Center for Science and Technology & Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena is looking forward to your inquiries via email to helpdesk@nfdi4chem.de or via the contact form on our NFDI4Chem website.

The Helpdesk will soon be supplemented by our NFDI4Chem Knowledgebase.