In December the first BioHackathon Germany was organised by the team of the German ELIXIR node. Leyla Jael Garcia-Castro (ZBMed and NFDI4Microbiota) and Steffen Neumann (IPB Halle and NFDI4Chem) used the opportunity and successfully submitted a proposal on (Bio)Schemas4NFDI.
Bioschemas is a community effort to improve FAIRness of resources in the Life sciences by defining specific metadata schemas as JSON+LD and exposing that metadata from participating resources. The name Bioschemas is a bit misleading, since from the early days the metadata schemas also covered concepts from chemistry or even information about training material and events.
Aim of the Hacking-workshop was to bring together metadata experts from Bioschemas and several NFDI consortia to adopt and adapt Bioschemas to NFDI use cases. We had participants from, e.g., NFDI4DataScience, GHGA, NFDI4Microbiota, and seven participants from NFDI4Chem.
Actual Hacking was divided into the Data Provider Department, where we were improving the number of supporting ressources, and the coverage of schema metadata provided. In the New & Improved Schemas Department we worked on improving the analytical DataSet, and the new chemical reaction type. The Querying / Harvesting / Exploitation Department had participants from IPB and TIB, and were actually working to make all that metadata useful for you. We were successful in fetching data from BioSchema providers (MassBank) and gathering them into the NFDI4Chem Search service. The presentation by Denitsa Eckweiler (TU Braunschweig) showed how PubPharm currently collects information useful in pharmaceutical chemistry, and we discussed how metadata on chemical data could be included in the future.
Finally, you are currently reading the first output from the Dissemination & Outreach Department, with more to come. We will contribute our experience to the NFDI Section Metadata, and if things work out, you’ll see more in 2023 at NFDI’s own metadata hackathon or the NFDI conference in September in Karlsruhe.
Tweets by de.NBI including some pictures can be found here.
