FAIR Research Data Management with NOMAD and FAIRmat
Abstract
These slides accompanied an invited tutorial presented at TCO 2026 on 28 September 2026 in Leipzig, Germany. The presentation introduces NOMAD, a free, open-source research data management platform developed and operated by FAIRmat, a consortium of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). NOMAD enables researchers to upload, organize, explore, analyze, and publish their data. By transforming heterogeneous research data into structured, machine-readable formats, the platform helps make them findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). The presentation provides an overview of relevant concepts, tools, and practical workflows for managing materials-science data throughout the research lifecycle. It covers data upload and automated processing, metadata extraction and enrichment, schema-based data modelling, data organization, search and exploration, analysis, and publication. It also introduces NOMAD’s support for experimental and computational data and discusses how structured, contextualized datasets can be prepared for machine-learning and artificial-intelligence applications. Both NOMAD deployment options are presented: the publicly accessible central platform and NOMAD Oasis, a customizable infrastructure that research groups and institutions can host and operate independently. The slides are intended for researchers, developers, and research-data professionals interested in interoperable data infrastructures, reproducible research, and applying the FAIR principles to computational and experimental materials science.
