On 26 May 2026, ahead of the official start of the Annual Meeting on Reaction Engineering in Würzburg, NFDI4Cat hosted the interactive workshop “From Metadata to Simulation: Connecting Data, Semantics and Workflows in Reaction Engineering.” The session brought together researchers, engineers, and industry representatives with a shared interest in improving research data management and creating stronger links between experimental work and digital, simulation-ready workflows.

In this hands-on, two-hour workshop, we introduced the core idea behind NFDI4Cat’s work in reaction engineering: enabling a smooth, traceable path from raw experimental results to reusable datasets and downstream applications by combining FAIR principles, semantic metadata, and structured digital workflows. Participants were invited to work with their own data and explore, step by step, how well-chosen metadata can make datasets more transparent, reproducible, and easier to interpret - not only for others, but also for your future self.

A central part of the workshop was a live demonstration of how straightforward it is to upload and document datasets in Repo4Cat, NFDI4Cat’s repository for research data in catalysis and reaction engineering. We discussed which metadata elements are essential to describe experimental conditions, materials, and processes clearly, and how these descriptions can be strengthened through ontologies and controlled vocabularies. By selecting suitable terms, datasets become more consistently described, more searchable, and better connected to subsequent workflows - including data-driven analysis and simulation.

We would like to sincerely thank all attendees for contributing their time, data, and expertise, and for making the session so interactive. NFDI4Cat thrives on exchange with the community, and the open discussions throughout the workshop were incredibly valuable. Special thanks also go to our four speakers Dr. Alexander Sommer-Behr, Dr. Michael Liebau, Marc Völkenrath and Dr. Sofia Angeli, whose contributions and practical insights helped shape the session and sparked many fruitful conversations.