Realizing FAIR Digital Objects for the German Helmholtz Association of Research Centres

The Helmholtz Association (Anonymous 2022d), the largest association of large-scale research centres in Germany, covers a wide range of research fields employing more than 43.000 researchers. In 2019, the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC) (Anonymous 2022f) Platform as a joint endeavor across all research areas of the Helmholtz Association was started to make the depth and breadth of research data produced by Helmholtz Centres findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) for the whole science community. To reach this goal, the concept of FAIR Digital Objects (FAIR DOs) has been chosen as top-level commonality for existing and future infrastructures of all research fields. In doing so, HMC follows the original approach of realizing FAIR DOs based on globally unique, Persistent Identifiers (PID), e.g., provided by https://handle.net/, machine actionable PID Records and strong typing using Data Types like https://dtr-test.pidconsortium.eu/#objects/21.T11148/1c699a5d1b4ad3ba4956 registered in a Data Type Registry, e.g., http://dtr-test.pidconsortium.eu/. In all these areas, HMC can build on the great groundwork of the Research Data Alliance and the FAIR DO Forum. However, when it comes to realization, there are still some gaps that will have to be addressed during our work and will be raised in this presentation. For single FAIR DO components like PIDs and Data Types, existing infrastructures are already available. Here, the Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen (GWDG) (Anonymous 2022e) provides strong support with their many years of experience in this field. Within the framework of the ePIC consortium (Anonymous 2022c), the GWDG is offering on the one hand PID prefixes based on a sustainable business model, on the other hand GWDG is very active in terms of providing base services required for realizing FAIR DOs, e.g., different instances of Data Type Registries for accessing, creating, and managing Data Types required by FAIR DOs. Besides that, in the context of HMC we developed a couple of technical components to support the creation and management of FAIR DOs: The Typed PID Maker (Pfeil 2022b) providing machine actionable interfaces for creating, validating, and managing PIDs with machine-actionable metadata stored in their PID record, or the FAIR DO testbed, currently evolving into the FAIR DO Lab (Pfeil 2022a), serving as reference implementation for setting up a FAIR DO ecosystem. However, introducing FAIR DO