DataPLANT at BioHackathon Europe held in Campus Belloch near Barcelona beginning of November

Wed Nov 13 2024

Colleagues from DataPLANT and Galaxy participated for a further time at BioHackathon Europe. This is an annual event organised by ELIXIR Europe that brings together life scientists from around the world. It offers an intense week of hacking, with over 160 participants working on diverse and exciting projects. The goal is to create code that addresses challenges in bioinformatics research. Each BioHackathon starts with a half-day symposium to introduce the various projects, and is followed by five days of hacking with one sole aim: coding to address challenges in bioinformatics. The projects are aligned to challenges proposed by ELIXIR Platforms, Communities and Focus Groups. The first BioHackathon Europe took place in Paris in 2018. It was based on the BioHackathons that The National Bioscience Database Center (NBDC) and Database Center for Life Science (DBCLS) have organised in Japan since 2008.

The DataPLANT colleagues and Galaxy members focused on:

• Project 26: Reducing the environmental impact of Galaxy - Workflow management systems (WMSs) such as Galaxy are uniquely positioned to enable researchers to perform more environmentally-sustainable computational data analysis as they have full control of the resources used for a given workflow. In this project we want to reduce Galaxy resource usage by focusing on: 1) job caching to enable the reuse of tool outputs, and 2) environmentally-friendly job scheduling.
• Project 19: Creating user benefit from ARC-ISA RO-Crate machine-actionability - The development of FAIR Digital Objects (FDOs) holds immense promise for advancing scientific research, yet one critical challenge persists: Despite efforts to create FDOs, achieving true machine-actionability remains elusive. We will address this pressing issue by focusing on the integration of Annotated Research Contexts (ARCs) within the scientific community. Recognizing the substantial efforts in annotating research and packaging it as RO-Crate FDOs, it is imperative to incentivize and leverage these endeavors to yield benefits transcending mere data management. ARCs as FDOs excel in meticulous record-keeping, rendering them indispensable in the realm of research data management.

The latter one is especially relevant for the future DataPLANT developments as dissemination and practical actionability of ARCs across diverse services, tools and repositories is pivotal in engendering user benefits. These platforms require the capacity to comprehend and interpret RO-Crates, enabling seamless interaction with FDOs. Drawing from ARC FDO consumption, search, and indexing platforms must provide users with comprehensive search results, while the service infrastructure can offer customised services tailored to the data described in the FDO.