“The goal is to create code that addresses challenges in bioinformatics research”
In early November, the annual BioHackathon Europe brought together over 180 life scientists from all over the world on site (and another 140 online) to work on exciting projects in just under a week. The goal: to create code that addresses the challenges of bioinformatics research.
As always organized by ELIXIR Europe, this year’s meeting place was the Belloch campus near Barcelona. The focus of the 32 projects was on topics such as FAIR research data, persistent identifiers, metadata standards, ontologies and metadata catalogs.
As representatives of FAIRagro, Gabriel Schneider (ZB Med), Julian Schneider (ZB Med), Daniel Arend (IPK) and Daniel Bauer (SGN) were particularly involved in projects 19 (“Creating user benefit from ARC-ISA RO-Crate machine-actionability”) and 24 (“Increasing FAIRness of digital agrosystem resources by extending Bioschemas”). In close cooperation with colleagues from four other NFDI consortia (NFDI4BioDiversity, NFDI4Earth, DataPLANT and NFDI4Health), metadata standards for FAIRagro services such as the FAIRagro search portal were developed and the integration of workflows into FAIR digital objects was advanced.
FAIRagro member Claus Weiland (SGN) also took part in project 2 (“A curated assessment of metadata descriptors of AI-ready datasets”). This project dealt with the question of how raw data can be described with metadata in such a way that it can be easily used for AI and its training. The goal: to significantly reduce the effort and time invested in data pre-processing for machine learning.
Daniel Arend: “I am still enthusiastic about the close collaboration with national and international colleagues and the sometimes groundbreaking discussions and results. I’ll be back next year!”
The results of this year’s BioHackathon Europe are currently being processed and are expected to be published in 2024. The next event will take place from November 3 to 7, 2025 in Berlin.