FAIRDOM user meetings
FAIRDOM organises user meetings twice a year. The purpose of these events is to maintain an active FAIRDOM user community, providing networking between various FAIRDOM-SEEK users and to learn from data management experiences in different research projects.
Engagement with other communities
FAIRDOM is typically involved in several hackathon projects each year, including ELIXIR BioHackathon Europe (the European ESFRI life sciences Infrastructure) and de.NBI BioHackathon Germany (the organisation behind the German node of ELIXIR). For example:
- At ELIXIR BioHackathon 2023 and 2024 (project 23) MARS: Multi-omics Adapter for Repository Submissions made great strides in producing a proof of concept for dispatching metadata to multiple repositories using the ISA-JSON format, a standard supported in and popularised by FAIRDOM-SEEK.
- At ELIXIR BioHackathon 2022 (project 27), a comprehensive strategy for an ISA-JSON-to-ELIXIR Repository brokering system was devised, in order to efficiently share heterogenous, multi-omics metadata to public repositories such as DataHub.
- At 1st BioHackathon Germany, a tool was produced to make it easier to generate MIAPPE-compliant ISA-JSON metadata, supported in FAIRDOM-SEEK.
The Systems Biology Community of ELIXIR is the community of systems biology experts within the infrastructure ELIXIR. It coordinates work done within ELIXIR to interlink and harmonise infrastructure for models, software and data. The overarching long-term goal of the ELIXIR Systems Biology Community is to make systems biology modelling a central pillar of research in biology. One way that FAIRDOM facilitates this goal is by providing a public joint repository for both models and data, FAIRDOMHub, which allows interlinking of experimental data, computational models and simulation results in a project-centred approach (Martins dos Santos et al. 2022, Wolstencroft et al. 2017).
History
From 2012 to 2018 we ran four “foundry” meetings with practitioners in support delivery for systems biology all over Europe, to exchange ideas and practices, to share software and to interoperate systems where useful to do so. We discontinued these meetings as the activities of foundry meetings were covered by the Systems Biology Community in ELIXIR, covering conceptual aspects of systems biology infrastructure, and the Biohackathons promoting exchange of ideas and information of systems biology infrastructure.
From 2011 to 2022, FAIRDOM PALs were the “front line” experimentalists, modellers and bioinformaticians from each of the projects we worked with. They acted as our advocates and communicated our progress back to their projects. We have now created dedicated community channels and regular meetings and encourage advocacy through these channels. For more about PALs, see the PALs presentations.