The need for a central access point for research software of the NFDI consortia arises from the growing need of the scientific disciplines of the cultural sciences, humanities and social sciences, engineering and the natural and life sciences to ensure the sustainable use and further development.

nfdi.software aims to create a central marketplace to improve access to NFDI research software, addressing the needs of various scientific disciplines for sustainable research software use and development.  The platform will extract, standardise, and enrich metadata, and applies an AI approach, providing continuous monitoring of software relevance and acceptance by its users. As a central service, nfdi.software will harvest, aggregate and harmonise software metadata from NFDI consortia marketplaces and registries, and will provide back enriched and curated metadata in future.

By establishing standards and improving networking across the NFDI, the project will develop a 'Prototype for Integration' based on prior initiatives. It will link and coordinate independent developments within a federated data infrastructure, enhancing networking and contextualization of research software as well as links to data and other research artefacts in the context of “OneNFDI”.