In this series, we share short interviews to introduce you to the diverse partners contributing to our LUMEN vision. Each month, we shine a spotlight on two of our partners—offering a glimpse into who they are, what they do, and what drives their work within LUMEN. In this edition, the TIB team answered our questions.
Can you briefly introduce your organisation and its role within the LUMEN project?
TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology is the German National Library for engineering, technology, and natural sciences, jointly funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the 16 German states, operating in conjunction with Leibniz Universität Hannover. As a world-leading specialist library and applied research centre, TIB develops digital infrastructures and services in areas such as semantic data modelling, open access, and FAIR data management to support researchers and industry. Within LUMEN, TIB is responsible for designing and implementing the FAIR Semantics Management Space—integrating ontology alignment, metadata enrichment, and JUST (Judicious, Unbiased, Safe, Transparent) data annotation workflows—to ensure interoperable, cross-domain discovery across Mathematics, SSH, Earth Systems, and Molecular Dynamics.
What is the most exciting aspect of your contribution to LUMEN, and how does it align with your organisation’s mission or values?
The most exciting aspect of TIB’s contribution to LUMEN is the creation of a domain-agnostic, FAIR Semantics Management Space that automates the FAIRification of data and metadata across disciplines, leveraging TIB’s expertise in semantic tooling (e.g., ORKG, JUST data annotation) and AI-supported metadata enrichment. This aligns directly with TIB’s mission to promote openness, transparency, and reusability of scientific knowledge—goals it advances through involvement in open-access initiatives like the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information.
LUMEN is all about interdisciplinary collaboration. How do you envision the project transforming the way research is conducted?
LUMEN’s emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration will transform research by enabling a federated data mesh architecture and a white-label GoTriple framework that allows seamless discovery of literature, datasets, software, and people across disparate domains. Researchers in SSH, for example, will be able to integrate computational models from Earth Systems or mathematical toolkits for data analysis without leaving a unified discovery platform, fostering novel collaborations and accelerating research cycles.
Looking ahead to 2027 and beyond, what impact do you hope the LUMEN project will have on the broader research community and beyond?
By 2027, TIB expects LUMEN to have established a self-sustaining, FAIR-by-design knowledge ecosystem within EOSC, where shared ontologies and persistent identifiers enable researchers to easily find and reuse resources across Mathematics, SSH, Earth Systems, and Molecular Dynamics. This will boost Open Science by expanding EOSC’s user base to underrepresented domains, improve trust and productivity in science, and serve as a blueprint for future interdisciplinary infrastructures—leaving a lasting legacy of transparent, collaborative research.