1st BioHackathon Germany with GHGA Contributions

The 1st BioHackathon Germany, organised by de.NBI, took place in the second week of December 2022, both in person in Wittenberg and online. The goal of this hackathon was to get experts together for a week and work on projects spanning bioinformatics, training, and FAIR data management.

The GHGA Team participated enthusiastically in two different projects. Bilge Sürün from the Workflows workstream contributed to the project "(Bio)Schemas4NFDI”while Julia Philipp from the Training Workstream contributed to the project “Mapping the training journey in Bioinformatics".

“(Bio)Schemas4NFDI - Schemas4GHGA”

Bioschemas is a framework to increase the findability of life science-centric data by promoting the usage of Schema.org markup in websites. Indexing life science data in search engines requires serialisation of the related information in standard semantic web formats. In the BioHackathon, we explored how to make GHGA datasets findable on Google Dataset Search. After identifying the minimum required information to emit Bioschemas, we performed a crosswalk to represent dataset metadata as a Bioschema entity. We also focused on automatically generating information representation directly from the metadata modelled with LinkML (YAML2Bioschemas). Due to time constraints, we could not complete our YAML2Bioschemas project. However, we established connections to collaborate on improving the findability of scientific data.

“Mapping the training journey in Bioinformatics”

This project aims to make bioinformatics training easier for trainees and trainers. We catalogued skills that people might want to acquire, and matched them with appropriate, already available training materials and courses. The resulting database will be transformed into an interactive website where trainers and trainees can find relevant materials according to their learning needs. Many ideas for the interactive visualisation of the data were tried out during the hackathon, but unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to finalise them yet. The project is open source and will be continued to be expanded by the EMBL Bio-IT Team, the GHGA Training Workstream, and any other interested parties.

Another one of our highlights was the public viewing of the GHGA Metadata Training Webinar in one of the seminar rooms in Wittenberg!

We’re excited to have participated in the first de.NBI biohackathon for all the experience and connections gained, and can't wait for the next instalment of this event.