Workshop Report: NFDI4Earth Synthesis Architecture

Abstract

The Task Area 3 2 Interoperate of the NFDI4Earth held a one-day workshop in April 2025 to advance the NFDI4Earth Synthesis Architecture. The workshop had three main parts: The first part dealt with the adoption of the Synthesis Architecture that is structured into three pillars (Community Services, NFDI4Earth Service, Basic IT Services), and each with dedicated building blocks, such as "Data Portal, Registry for Infrastructures and Services, or Middleware Services", which was already described earlier. As key goals at this workshop were identified that a) the building block descriptions will be published in the Living Handbook of the NFDI4Earth, b) expert curators have to be assigned to enrich content with implementations and standards, and c) interconnections between the building blocks will be developed. The second part discussed interoperability through Data as a Service (DaaS), and DaaS was identified as a core principle for enabling interoperability. In the third part the onboarding and integration mechanisms were discussed, and the focus was on creating an effective onboarding process for stakeholders and services. Here the key points were that a targeted, persona-based onboarding with real-world use cases was proposed. The onboarding should be expert-guided, with preparatory phases and support tools (e.g., promotional material).