Mission & Vision
Mission
Purpose of the Helmholtz-KG
The Helmholtz-KG provides a structured, cross-domain, and semantically connected view of Helmholtz metadata, and with it the Helmholtz digital ecosystem. Instead of metadata being isolated within individual centers, the KG brings them together using harmonised schemas and mappings based on globally recognised standards.
This unified representation enables the analysis of metadata quality, compatibilty and interoperabilty across infrastructures, supports FAIR principles, and provides researchers and data professionals with a powerful tool for exploring scientific outputs and relationships.
Driving Cultural and Technical Improvement
The KG is a growing infrastructure, currently in its infancy. After carefully designing stable and scalable data pipelines we are now beginning to unboard new data sources across Helmholtz to gradually increase the coverage of the graph and the connectivity of our digital ecosystem.
Through the KG, metadata becomes measurable, enabling improvement activities. By observing trends, identifying structural issues, and comparing metadata across Helmholtz centers, the KG informs dialogues with data providers, guides harmonisation efforts, and supports evidence-based recommendations on metadata schemas and mappings.
Vision
A Comprehensive Metadata Backbone
The Helmholtz-KG aims to become the metadata backbone of the Helmholtz Association, integrating digital assets, research outputs, and entity relationships across all centers and domains.
As the graph grows, it will support advanced metadata workflows, integration of top-level domain data from domain-specific ontologies and "local" knowledge graphs, metric-driven quality assessment, and cross-domain exploration. The KG informs policy, supports infrastructure integration, guides community practices, and enables intelligent metadata enrichment.
Connecting Helmholtz to the Global Knowledge Landscape
The KG also positions Helmholtz metadata for interoperability with external scientific knowledge graphs and infrastructures, increasing visibility and enabling integration beyond the association. With the Helmholtz KG, the Helmholtz Metadata Collabotration (HMC) "unHIDEs" the state of metadata, revealing Helmholtz Digital capacity to the world
