In the old days, research was done by famous individuals. Nowadays, research is a team effort! Working together requires making agreements about how to collaborate and using common tools. These kinds of agreements (or standards) and tools are especially crucial given the amount of data nowadays. Me and around 800 other people attended the 2nd Conference on Research Data Infrastructure, in Aachen, Germany from August 26 to 28, 2025. In this blog post I will reflect on the various presentations and posters I saw as well as the discussions I had.

It is difficult to foster innovation and perform high quality research when the underlying data is not accessible and usable. Data and data services should be offered via so-called research data infrastructures, think of user-friendly web platforms, repositories, and databases. But how does it work in practice, and how important is the human aspect of it? I have been at the 1st Conference on Research Data Infrastructure, 12 – 14 September 2023, and got some pretty good insights. In this blog post I will reflect on the conference and cover the keynotes, the poster sessions, our own work around Knowledge Graphs and Wikibase, as well as a selection of other interesting talks.