A coordinated, nationally-scoped programme and set of services for the storage, sharing, and reuse of research data within a country, typically combining funding policy, technical infrastructure (repositories, compute, federation), training, and governance.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 10 Jul 2026

Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
The Australian Research Data Commons (ardc.edu.au).
Is an instance
Germany's NFDI consortia covering chemistry, biodiversity, physics, social sciences, and more.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
A single university repository is not a national data infrastructure.
Not an instance
An individual private cloud account is not a national data infrastructure.

Editorial commentary

National data infrastructures emerged through funder strategies in the 2010s. Examples include the UK Data Service, Australia’s Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), Germany’s NFDI (Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur), the Netherlands’ Health-RI, France’s Recherche Data Gouv, and Canada’s DRI Alliance / Federated Research Data Repository. They typically coordinate domain-specific data services with cross-domain infrastructure (PID services, AAI, training) and engage with international federations (EOSC).

References

OECD, 'Building digital workforce capacity and skills for data-intensive science' (OECD Science, Technology and Industry Policy Papers, 2020).
NFDI, 'About NFDI' (nfdi.de).

Also known as

NRI · National research data infrastructure

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="National data infrastructure"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/national-data-infrastructure" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/national-data-infrastructure",
  "name": "National data infrastructure",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/national-data-infrastructure",
  "description": "A coordinated, nationally-scoped programme and set of services for the storage, sharing, and reuse of research data within a country, typically combining funding policy, technical infrastructure (repositories, compute, federation), training, and governance.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/data-infrastructure#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/national-data-infrastructure",
  "sameAs": [
    "NRI",
    "National research data infrastructure"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-10T02:06:21",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

View CASRAI adoption →