March 13, 2025
In a change to our usual FAIRDOM User Meeting format, we hosted the first FAIRDOM Mini Hackathon on 20 Februrary 2025. Users, developers, leaders and advocates from seven institutions in five countries created an opportunity to collaborate, discuss and progress a range of matters and features which will be of benefit to the wider FAIRDOM-SEEK community. We also welcomed those interested in learning more about FAIRDOM-SEEK and how it could benefit their work.
The mini hackathon format allowed us to discuss and plan upcoming work, without needing to commit any code immediately. We ran four projects in parallel, covering a range of concepts and teams.
RO-Crates and FAIR Data Station interoperability
RO-Crates are increasingly important for exchanging research data, such as importing metadata into FAIRDOM-SEEK. This project, led by Stuart Owen (University of Manchester) looked at matters of interoperability and integration between FAIRDOM-SEEK and FAIR Data Station. They discussed overlaps between FAIR Data Station output and RO-Crate, and the ability to manage ISA permissions, batch permission changes per Investigation.
Improving controlled vocabulary usage and extended metadata
This project was jointly led by Wolfgang Mueller and Xiaoming Hu (Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies). They developed new features about controlled vocabularies usage, such as adding sharing permissions, and ensuring that information fetched from OLS is not editable (such as URI and definition for each item).
Applying machine learning for additional discoveries
The project led by Charlie Demurjian (MIT) discussed how to use machine learning tools to enhance data curation. They looked at NExtSEEK as a background for making additional discoveries from existing data, using text prompts to an LLM chat-bot or potentially an ontology-based search.
Collecting and organizing ‘niggles’ (small irritations)
Lastly, we ran a project led by Phil Reed (University of Manchester) which was more accessible to people starting out with FAIRDOM-SEEK but also people who have been working with it for many years. They looked at the journeys which new users take through the documentation pages and websites, and collected some other minor irritations to be fixed after the event by the community.
Next steps
Each project collected a list of next steps to take back across the FAIRDOM consortium. For example, the MIT group are refining questions to ask an agent/chat bot for data management related tasks. If anyone is interested in collaborating with them, please get in touch with Charlie directly (or contact us). Our next FAIRDOM user meeting will run in early autumn 2025, check back here for details.