FAIRDOM, based on the SEEK platform by the group of Carole Goble and the group of Wolfgang Müller, is used by multiple Nodes in ELIXIR as data management platform.
Through a joint event organised in June 2019 in Ghent we have initiated adoption and capacity building in the Belgian Node. Within the ELIXIR-CONVERGE project FAIRDOM is put forward as a component of the data management toolkit. We have regular teleconferences where people from Belgium, Germany, Norway and UK discuss developments and future directions of FAIRDOM. The different Nodes have different expertises and focus areas, which are well aligned and complementary.
The development of FAIRDOM initiated in the UK and Germany. In the UK this platform will be the basis for the workflow registry (EOSC-Life WP2). Integration with other platforms, such as Galaxy and Jupyter Notebooks, is one of the focus areas for the German Node. These aspects are of interest for all Nodes involved.
In Norway the platform has been integrated with the NeLS infrastructure, this is very much of interest for the Belgian Node, where a national/regional infrastructure is being planned. Within the Belgian national project, we will be focussing on the integration of metadata schemas for life sciences data into the platform. This will enable users to capture all required metadata to submit data to the recommended Deposition Databases. Also community engagement is an important topic, lead by the UK Node.
The aim of the staff exchange project is to:
- kickstart the integration of submission capabilities into Deposition Databases into FAIRDOM. This will facilitate submission of FAIR data for end-users
- expedite integration of FAIRDOM with the underlying storage platform in Belgium, based on the experience in the Norwegian Node
- further develop pipelines and workflows for research projects and data analysis in FAIRDOM, based on the experience of the ELIXIR UK Node
- to better understand how FAIRDOM is currently used by researchers in the UK, Norway and Germany, and identify the features that must be improved
- discuss and identify specific features that need to be implemented in FAIRDOM in order to improve the user interface