Call for Papers

Fifth Workshop on Big (and Small) Data in Science and Humanities

BigDS 2025@ BTW 2025, Bamberg, Germany

Andreas Henrich, Universität Bamberg  |  Naouel Karam, Institut für Angewandte Informatik (InfAI)  |  Birgitta König-Ries, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena  |  Richard Lenz, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg | Stefanie Scherzinger, Universität Passau | Bernhard Seeger, Philipps-Universität Marburg

The importance of data has dramatically increased in almost all scientific disciplines over the last decade, e.g., in meteorology, genomics, complex physics simulations, biological and environmental research, medicine, and recently also in the humanities and social sciences. This development is due to great advances in data acquisition and accessibility, e.g., improvements in remote sensing, powerful mobile devices, popularity of social networks, and the ability to handle unstructured data (including texts). On the one hand, the availability of such data masses leads to a rethinking in scientific disciplines on how to extract useful information and foster research. On the other hand, researchers feel lost in the data masses because appropriate data management, integration, discovery, analysis, and visualization tools are only rudimentarily available so far. However, this is starting to change with the recent developments of big data technologies and with progress in AI, natural language processing, semantic technologies and others that are not only useful in business, but also offer great opportunities in science and humanities. Scientific workflows must be realized as flexible end-to-end analytic solutions to allow for complex data processing, integration, analysis, and visualization of Big Data in various application domains.

For the workshop, we are particularly interested in two aspects: First, how can tools support the achievement of the FAIR principles, e.g., legal aspects? And second, what contributions can the database and information systems community make to the conceptualisation and implementation of Germany’s National Research Data Infrastructure NFDI?

This workshop intends to bring together scientists from various disciplines and  NFDI consortia with database researchers to discuss real-world problems in data research infrastructures, data science, and big data technologies. The workshop will consist of three parts: an inspiring invited talk from an international expert, presentations of accepted workshop papers and concrete working groups on challenging subjects.

Topics of Interest

In the context of big and small data in science and humanities, the scope of the workshop includes, but is not limited to:

• Big Data architectures in research infrastructures
• Use-cases for the design, implementation, optimization of scientific workflows
• Data integration for scientific applications
• Data archives, data repositories, data governance
• Data provenance, data quality and data curation
• FAIR data principles
• Natural language processing, text analytics
• Semantic technologies and knowledge graphs
• Metadata and data standards for FAIR data
• Research infrastructures for data streams
• Transformation & exchange of very large scientific data
• Scalable Analysis of Research Data
• Predictive domain models in science
• Scalable visualization of research data
• User interfaces in big data research infrastructures
• Case studies and best practices in NFDI and other scientific data projects  
• Big Data and grand challenge science questions
• New applications in humanities and social sciences
• Research Data Life Cycle
• Legal and ethical aspects
• Ontology-based data acquisition 
• AI-enabled methods
• AI-readiness for research data

Submission Guidelines

Submitted papers will be refereed by the workshop Program Committee. Accepted papers will appear in the BTW’25 Workshops proceedings, published as part of LNI. The papers should be written in German or English and adhere to the LNI formatting guidelines. Research and Experience papers are limited to 10 pages excluding references, Position papers to 6 pages excluding references.

Research papers must be an original unpublished work and not under review elsewhere. Experience reports must be stated as such and a comprehensive discussion of the taken approach, experiences, and its assessment are expected. All papers and reports must be submitted as PDF documents via the Conftool. 

Authors of accepted high-quality papers will be invited to submit an extended version of the paper for publication in Datenbank Spektrum.

Workshop Agenda (preliminary)

• Invited talks
• Presentation of accepted workshop papers
• Discussion Round: Participants will brainstorm for open questions in research infrastructures and will then form groups to discuss possible solutions and future directions.

Important Dates

Program Committee

• Alsayed Algergawy (University of Passau)
• Thomas Brinkhoff (Jade Hochschule)
• Stefan Deßloch (RPTU Kaiserslautern)
• Jana Diesner (TU München)
• Thomas Eckart (University of Leipzig)
• Michael Gertz (University of Heidelberg)
• Nikolaus Glombiewski (University of Marburg)
• Anton Güntsch (Botanischer Garten Berlin)
• Andreas Hardt (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)
• Alfons Kemper (TU München)
• Toralf Kirsten (University of Leipzig)
• Ulf Leser (HU Berlin)
• Bertram Ludäscher (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
• Wolfgang Müller (HITS)
• Christoph Neumann (OTH Amberg)
• Thorsten Papenbrock (University of Marburg)
• Matthias Renz (CAU Kiel)
• Harald Sack (KIT)
• Sirko Schindler (DLR Institut für Datenwissenschaften)
• Sonja Schimmler (Fraunhofer Fokus, Berlin)
• Dagmar Triebel (Staatliche Naturwissenschaftliche Sammlungen Bayerns)
• York Sure-Vetter (KIT)
• Philipp Wieder (University of Göttingen)
• Claus Weiland (SGN Frankfurt)