Vortragende: Dr. Ivaylo Kostadinov und Prof. Dr. Philipp Wieder (Gesellschaft für Biologische Daten e.V. (GFBio))

The Research Data Commons (RDC) is a federated, cloud-based research infrastructure designed to support scientists, data providers, and data consumers in creating and sharing FAIR data products. It promotes the interoperability of data and services across the domains of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and the broader research landscape. For the biodiversity community, the RDC provides essential support for integrating and analyzing heterogeneous datasets such as species occurrence records, environmental measurements, and genomic sequence data.

NFDI4Biodiversity has laid the technical groundwork by integrating selected community services—such as data search, visualization, and publication tools—into a common platform, while also establishing foundational infrastructure components like scalable storage and unified identity and access management. We have also implemented community-driven use cases as a proof of viability of the RDC. Going forward, we aim to further consolidate and progressively professionalize the services integrated into and supported by the RDC platform. To this end, we will adopt key organisational principles from the data mesh architecture to foster strong and sustained community engagement in the co-creation process. Biodiversity domain experts will play a central role in developing reusable data products, collaborating closely with software developers and service stewards to ensure data quality, interoperability, and long-term sustainability.

By reducing the technical and organizational barriers to data reuse, the RDC empowers the biodiversity research community to shift focus from data wrangling to knowledge generation—supporting better science, policy, and conservation outcomes.