Introducing the Mathematical Research Data Initiative (MaRDI) and its services

Note from the Editor: This article was written by IMAGINARY, a non-profit organization dedicated to mathematics communication and a participant institution in the MaRDI consortium. We thank the IMAGINARY team for providing this content.

Have you ever wondered what qualifies as mathematical research data? Research data in mathematics comes in many flavors: papers, formulae, theorems, code, scripts, notebooks, software, models, simulated and experimental datasets, and libraries of math objects with properties of interest... Despite many preconceptions, mathematicians do use research data, and mathematics is increasingly becoming a much more data-driven science. Unfortunately, there is no straightforward or standard way to make these digital objects available for future generations of researchers. Availability, however, is not the only concern. In an ideal world, mathematical research data would be FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

The question of what is mathematical research data and how to make it FAIR is very much at the core of the Mathematical Research Data Initiative (MaRDI), which is a part of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). MaRDI wants to ensure that all this data is used and reused efficiently across disciplines, and the initiative is dedicated to building infrastructures to make mathematical research data FAIR. As part of this process, it is especially important for MaRDI to engage the mathematics community—which is you!

This is a list of the services that MaRDI is developing for the mathematical community. We hope that one or more of these services will become a useful tool in your daily work as a mathematician:

• MaRDI Portal (Web application): This is the primary access point and query interface to the MaRDI knowledge graph, facilitating the exploration and utilisation of open mathematical research data.

• MaRDI Knowledge Graph (Database): The MaRDI Knowledge Graph is a comprehensive resource containing over 5 million items and 500 million relationships among open mathematical research data. This graph integrates essential data from a diverse array of data sources, including DLMF, CRAN, PolyDB, swMATH, zb-MATH Open, arXiv, and OpenML. It is accessible through an API and the MaRDI portal and supports the mathematical research community by offering comprehensive insights and facilitating cross-referencing among datasets, publications, and research outputs.

• MaRDI Packaging System (Tool/Application): MaPS helps researchers create and publish software runtimes, as well as deploy and run software inside published runtimes.

• MaRDMO (Tool/Application): MaRDMO is a plugin for the Research Data Management Organiser (RDMO) software designed to streamline workflow documentation. Primarily utilized for Model-Simulation-Optimization workflows in the numerical domain, MaRDMO also exhibits versatility in accommodating workflows from other domains, such as algebra.

• MediaWiki Math Search Extension (Tool/Application): This plug-in extension allows semantic formula search in the MaRDI knowledge graph and several wikis dealing with mathematical formulae.

• MaRDI Help Desk (Outreach | Support/Consulting): The MaRDI Help Desk is your first entry point to MaRDI services, support, and training. Our data consultants can help you find out how to handle your research data in practice, what to write in a funding application about it, or how to connect to existing infrastructure and projects. More generally, the Help Desk will support you with all questions concerning mathematical research data.

• MaRDI Open Interfaces (Tool/Application): Software and interoperability protocols to connect different numerical packages together. Users can invoke numerical solvers written in one programming language from another one. Implementations for the same numerical problem are accessed via a generic interface to avoid code modifications when switching implementations.

Some of these services are already available, others are still in beta version. You can find out more at the MaRDI website.

We also have many outreach and dissemination materials about what MaRDI represents and our goals. Here are some of the things we did to spread the word. Have a look!

• Math & Data Quarterly, our newsletter.
• MaRDI Station, a rentable collaborative multiplayer game called Data Quest. Players navigate the University Quarter of Mathhattan, interact with different characters and help them solve quests related to various topics around mathematical research data. For more information or to rent the MaRDI Station for your institute or your event, contact the MaRDI team at newsletter@mardi4nfdi.de. The game is openly licensed and available at GitHub. There is a smaller version of the game for one player available to play online here.
• Poster What type of mathematician are you? for download (or have it mailed to your office physically).
• Workshops on special topics for different audiences. Keep an eye on the list of upcoming workshops.

Image credit: Ariel Cotton, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

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