FDO Connect – Development of a service architecture for data exchange with FAIR Digital Objects

FDO Connect aims to expand the practical use of FAIR Digital Objects (FDOs) and strengthen their strategic relevance. FDOs act as a universal data standard that enables the unification, identification, and interlinking of datasets across domains. The project aims to close implementation gaps, establish FDOs in diverse application areas, and explore initial commercial usage strategies.

The project is structured into four work packages:

• Infrastructure Development: Establishing a foundational infrastructure for publishing, managing, and linking FDOs, using nanopublications to represent layered metadata.
• Tooling: Developing a tool to automatically convert unstructured data into structured, machine-actionable FDOs.
• Cross-Domain Application: Applying the infrastructure and tools across multiple independent use cases.
• Evaluation and Dissemination: Assessing the FDO service architecture from legal and economic perspectives and preparing results for targeted audiences.

The name "FDO Connect" reflects three core integrations:

• Combining Handle-based FDO repositories with nanopublications,
• Linking databases and data spaces across domains,
• Enabling collaboration among leading actors in the FDO community.

• Implementation Gaps: Despite conceptual maturity, FDOs still face barriers to operational deployment.
• Data Heterogeneity: Converting diverse, unstructured data into structured formats is technically demanding.
• Cross-Domain Interoperability: Ensuring semantic and technical compatibility across sectors like science, industry, and public administration.
• Legal and Economic Uncertainty: The regulatory and business implications of FDO-based infrastructures are not yet fully resolved.
• Stakeholder Coordination: Aligning diverse contributors from academia, industry, and infrastructure initiatives.

• Nanopublication-Based Infrastructure: Supports fine-grained, verifiable metadata and persistent identifiers.
• Automated Structuring Tools: Facilitate the transformation of raw data into structured, FAIR-compliant FDOs.
• Foundations for Autonomous FDOs: The project’s layered metadata model and nanopublication-based architecture lay the groundwork for autonomous FDOs, digital objects capable of carrying their own context, provenance, and logic for decentralised processing.
• Use Case Diversity: Demonstrates the flexibility and scalability of the approach across domains.
• Structured Project Management: Implements the PRINCE2 methodology for transparent and adaptive execution.
• Legal-Economic Evaluation: Informs sustainable business models and compliance strategies.
• Community Integration: Builds momentum through collaboration with key actors in the FDO ecosystem

• Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (Fraunhofer FIT, ISST)
• AMI Advanced Machine Intelligence
• Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH (DFKI)
• Deutsches Institut für Normung e.V.
• FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz-Institut für Informationsinfrastruktur
• Frankfurt School of Finance and Management
• Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen (GWDG)
• Hochschule Hannover
• IndiScale
• Karlsruher Institut für Technologie
• Knowledge Pixels AG
• Nextlearning e.V.
• QBITFLOW GmbH
• Rechtsberatung Prof. Dr. Mario Martini
• RWTH Aachen
• SpiritLegal
• Universität Bremen
• YottaSen Forschungs-GmbH