DBRepo as a Service - Development and Implementation of a Service for the Sustainable Operation of FAIR Heterogeneous Relational Research Databases

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas Stäcker
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 562333837

Although relational databases are a widely used technology in science and arts and humanities, the sustainable operation of research databases is a neglected area in current research data management. Our project therefore aims to develop a sustainable and low-threshold solution for the management, use and FAIR publication of functional databases. The intended service will be implemented as a repository for relational (SQL) databases based on the open source software DBRepo from the Vienna University of Technology, in which the functionality of the databases is preserved and queries can be reproduced using version-specific DOIs. In addition to providing the service as "Software as a Service" to a broad user base beyond the TU Darmstadt, the project also includes the functional further development of DBRepo and the establishment of a user and development community to ensure the long-term availability and further development of the software. The project will be carried out in close cooperation with already identified scholarly use cases, which will manage their databases in DBRepo under the supervision of the applicants and on the basis of their requirements the applicants will further develop DBRepo in a user-driven and practice-oriented manner. The main goals are to increase the semanticity of the information stored in the databases and to implement an AI assistant that converts natural language user input into SQL syntax. An environment for the sustainable hosting of presentation layers will also be provided in order to make the content of the databases accessible in a low-threshold manner in the form of websites. An export function based on the SIARD (Software Independent Archiving of Relational Databases) schema is also planned, which will allow databases to be transferred to a connected system for long-term archiving.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Co-Investigators: Dominik Demuth; Dr. Marc Fuhrmans; Gerald Jagusch; Jürgen Windeck