NES

TDCC Natural & Engineering Sciences

The Thematic Digital Competence Centre (TDCC) for the Natural & Engineering Sciences (NES) is a network organisation that will bring together researchers, local DCC’s, infrastructure providers, knowledge and expertise networks, as well as other strategic initiatives within the NES domain. The aim of the TDCC NES (and of the other two TDCC’s) is to facilitate researchers to manage data and software in a FAIR manner. The TDCC can contribute to this aim through the identification of bottlenecks and initiating projects to mitigate these bottlenecks. 

Read the TDCC NES Road Map

Governance

The TDCC NES will form a network, governed by community partners (read more on governance). Since the TDCC NES only recently kicked off (September 2022) there is temporarily a small group that supports the Network Manager and Community Manager in their work. This group are the lead authors of the Road Map: Marta Teperek (4TU.ResearchData), Anthony Brown (Leiden University), David Groep (Nikhef), Vera Sarkol (CWI) and Alessandro Spinuso (KNMI).

If you would like to join the Network and take part in the governance of the TDCC NES please contact us.

Current bottleneck projects

Bottleneck 1: Community building

The goal of the community building is to facilitate collaboration and exchange between researchers from various disciplines and connect them to tools and infrastructure providers. Within this activity the TDCC NES will build its online presence where community members can find each other, and will organise network events and workshops. 

Bottleneck 2: Training hub

One of the biggest roadblocks to improve FAIR practices within the NES research communities is the large fragmentation with regards the skills necessary to put the FAIR principles into practice for both data and software. Funding is available through the TDCC NES to support the delivery of a training programme for the NES domain.

Bottleneck 3: Long term software sustainability

A dedicated project will be launched to facilitate long term software preservation and reusability of software. At present a group around 20 researchers from the NES community is defining this project. We will keep you informed through this website. 

Bottleneck 4: Metadata & vocabularies

One of the key bottlenecks to improve FAIR practices within NES research is the lack of interoperability (insufficient metadata standards and insufficient vocabularies). This bottleneck focuses on the development of community based standards and infrastructures for interoperable data handling.