KadiStudio: FAIR Modelling of Scientific Research Processes

Abstract

FAIR handling of scientific data plays a significant role in current efforts towards a more sustainable research culture and serves as a prerequisite for the fourth scientific paradigm, that is, data-driven research. To enforce the FAIR principles by ensuring the reproducibility of scientific data and tracking their provenance comprehensibly, the FAIR modelling of research processes in form of automatable workflows is necessary. By providing reusable procedures containing expert knowledge, such workflows contribute decisively to the quality and the acceleration of scientific research. In this work, the requirements for a system to be capable of modelling FAIR workflows are defined and a generic concept for modelling research processes as workflows is developed. For this, research processes are iteratively divided into impartible subprocesses at different detail levels using the input-process-output model. The concrete software implementation of the identified, universally applicable concept is finally presented in form of the workflow editor KadiStudio of the Karlsruhe Data Infrastructure for Materials Science (Kadi4Mat).