July 18, 2025
We are pleased to announce a new major version of FAIRDOM-SEEK is now available, which is version 1.17.0
This is a large new version, and highlights include:
- A period of maintenance, doing various updates and spring cleaning, including:
- Rails upgrade to 7.2
- Ruby upgrade to 3.3
- Updates of dependencies.
- Addressing hard to maintain code and cleaning up technical debt.
- Integrated Institutions with Research Organization Registry (ROR)
- When either editing or creating, Institutions can be searched via the ROR api and automatically populated.
- Linking an Institution to an ROR persistent identifier, either through searching or manually.
- Added a field for Department, for cases where more specific details are needed.
- Update the API to include ROR details.
- Institutions can still be registered manually, without ROR, for cases where it is missing from the registry.
- Extended support for Fair Data Station (FDS)
- Extended Metadata types and Sample types can now be easily created from an example output from FDS.
- Asynchronous imports and updates using a background job, with current status displayed, to support large cases which would otherwise timeout.
- Retaining a history of the FDS files used to import or update.
- recognises disabled EMT’s.
- Further integration with the ELIXIR Norway NeLS system, to support more features that can be done directly in SEEK:
- Browsing datasets, subtypes, files and folders.
- Downloading files.
- Creating datasets.
- Creating folders.
- Uploading files.
- Updates required to use the latest NeLS API.
- WorkflowHub enhancements:
- Git related api and documentation improvements.
- Updates to the EDAM controlled vocabularies to synchronise with their latest ontology - for topics, operations, data types and data formats.
- DataHub enhancements:
- Dynamic table fixes and improvements.
- Improve non-text attributes (e.g. related DataFiles, Samples) in Experiment view.
- Fix to linking Sample types to Assay Streams.
- Added the ability to edit the title and description for ISA snapshots.
- Where SEEK is used together with a triple store, the RDF registered now correctly sets the data type, e.g. for datetime.
- A rework of exporting a list of publications, with a fix to correctly apply the visible filters applied.
- A configurable maximum number of filters (default 5) that can be applied by anonymous users, to reduce overheads from AI bots.
- Fixes related to deleting contributors.
- Fix to the Restart Background Workers feature available to administrators, as well as clearer indication of what are running and how many there should be.
- Admin feature to list all registered users with profiles.
… and much more.
More details about what changes are included can be found in the 1.17.0 Release Notes.
Details on installing SEEK can be found in our Documentation, at https://docs.seek4science.org/get-seek.html – including running with Docker.
The upgrade guide can be found in the usual place at https://docs.seek4science.org/tech/upgrading.html.
Details on upgrading for Docker can be found on the page https://docs.seek4science.org/tech/docker/docker-compose.html.