The programme of Metadata, Ontologies & Interoperability combines a comprehensive overview of approaches,
current activities and promising results and discussions about future developments with a very practical hands-on hackathon based around the integration of existing solutions in developments of projects. The projects FAIRCORE4EOSC and FAIR-IMPACT will provide and facilitate an interactive programme, to be combined with the insights of the Task Force Semantic Interoperability.
Approach
The first session will focus on challenges related to semantics and interoperability in the EOSC SRIA. In this session, participants from various EOSC projects will form small groups of 2 to 3 people. Their task is to demonstrate how the results of one project can be applied in the context of another project. By the end of this session, participants will understand the outcomes of different projects and Task Forces, and they will have identified new challenges and potential collaborations to address these challenges. On the second day, the focus will be on a practical hackathon about Semantic Artefacts. The aim is for participants to gain hands-on experience and feedback on their projects’ contributions or expectations from the EOSC partnership, including experiments and the development of immediate solutions.
Objectives
- Scoping the landscape by mapping contributions from both projects and Task Forces on Metadata, Ontologies & Interoperability.
- Identify future synergies, collaborations and needs between the projects and Task Forces.
- Integrate and advance on the different developments around semantics in Metadata, Ontologies & Interoperability.
Outcomes
- Deployable solutions on the challenges surrounding metadata, semantic artefacts (and their catalogues) and interoperability.
- Identified shared challenges and collaboration opportunities between projects and Task Forces on developments surrounding OA2 FAIR Assessment, for both the present day as well as the future.
The programme on Metadata, Ontologies & Interoperability kicks off with an entry-level session.
This session serves as an introductory discussion on Metadata, Ontologies, and Interoperability, specifically focusing on the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA). Our aim is to comprehensively understand our current position and the challenges that remain within this context.
Participants will share the outcomes of their projects, providing insights into both past achievements and future expectations. This will help us gain a complete picture of the current state in relation to EOSC and SRIA objectives.
We will use the Opportunity Area Matrix spreadsheet, previously distributed to project members and technical coordinators, as a foundational tool for our discussions. This session will also include updates from the Task Force on Semantic and Technical Interoperability, highlighting solved problems, emerging challenges, and existing gaps.
The session will end with a group discussion. We’ll talk about how to create a unified approach to metadata and semantics.
We’ll also have one-on-one talks with each participant from OA2. We want to understand how your project adds to the Matrix. Close collaboration between project representatives and their teams or coordinators is crucial for accurate project representation. Please prepare for these discussions, as we will be contacting you before the Winter School to emphasize the importance of thorough preparation.
Objectives
- Providing an overview of how projects (current and new projects) address the laid-out challenges in SRIA (v1.1) and EOSC IF and how far EOSC is in tackling those challenges through the (expected) developed results of projects.
- Revising the guidelines and recommendations and general limitations in important strategic documents like the SRIA (v1.1) and EOSC Task Forces.
- Identifying new challenges through the work of projects and the conclusions of the Task Forces.
Outcomes
- An up to date and complete overview of the current situation addressing the challenges concerning Metadata, Ontologies and Interoperability, including general recommendations, lessons learned and future challenges.
- An initial vision on metadata and semantics that should inform SRIA 2.0 on Metadata, Ontologies and Interoperability
SRIA SESSION
Time: 14:00 – 18:00
Session chair: TBC
Session rapporteur: Roksana Wilk
Speakers: Each EOSC project participant
On Wednesday, we’ll have a full day of practical work focusing on OA2.
The day will start with brief 10-minute presentations from each team, outlining their goals for the day. We expect 4 or 5 teams, each with 2 or 3 members from different EOSC projects, although more teams might join at the last minute. Each team should come with an idea for a project to work on and present later. A good example would be using the result of one project (like a product or service) in the context of another project.
The main aim is to explore how different tools and solutions from these projects can be integrated and how information can be shared with Task Forces. We’ll identify areas that need more work, such as semantic artefact catalogues, creating connections between artefacts, APIs, and applying recommendations.
The afternoon will continue with this hands-on work on OA2. We’ll wrap up the day with short presentations from each team, sharing what they’ve achieved.
Examples of possible team topics:
- Experimenting with FAIR-IMPACT semantic artefact catalogues
- Describe EOSC project research software with FAIR-IMPACT’s metadata guidelines
- Identify EOSC projects approach to semantic artefacts (governance and catalogues).
- Load semantic artefacts from EOSC projects to an OntoPortal-based catalogue
- FAIRness assessment of semantic artefacts used within EOSC projects (evaluate the level of FAIRness of a semantic artefact in use in an EOSC project and improve it with FAIR-IMPACT solutions (e.g., O’FAIRe and FOOPS!))
- Register existing schemas with FAIRCORE4EOSC’s MSCR
- Register an existing crosswalk with MSCR
- Create a crosswalk between schemas using MSCR’s crosswalk editor
- Connect a data repository within an EOSC project to a semantic artefact catalogue.
- Federate multiple semantic artefact catalogues from different projects.
- Consume FAIRCORE4EOSC MSCR’s mappings into a semantic application.
- Implement FAIR-IMPACT semantic artefact catalogue API.
Objectives
- Experiment the tools/methods/products developed or in-used in EOSC projects into several other ones.
- Experiment how the tools/methods/products developed or in-used in current EOSC projects can be translated or re-used into other projects.
Outcomes
Better knowledge of the components developed/used/recommended by EOSC projects so to provide feedback and anticipate how to address their limits in the long term.
HANDS-ON SESSION
Time: 09:30 – 19:00
Session Chair: TBC
Session rapporteur: Roksana Wilk
| TIMESLOT | DESCRIPTION | FORMAT | CONTENT |
| 09:30 – 09:40 | Introduction to the hands-on session | Introductory presentation | This session looks back at the outcomes of the Tuesday session and introduces the hands-on work programme for the Metadata, Ontologies and Interoperability track |
| 09:40 – 10:40 | Presentations by each teams of their expected topic | Group work | In this session, the participants (who will be divided in teams based) present their experiment that they will work on during the day |
| 10:40 – 11:00 | Team work session: experimenting with an outcome of one project used within the context of another project | Work session | In this interactive sessions the teams are working to solve their experiments and challenges |
| 11:00 – 11:15 | Coffee break | ||
| 11:15 – 12:30 | Team work session: experimenting with an outcome of one project used within the context of another project | Work session | In this interactive sessions the teams are working to solve their unique experiments and challenges |
| WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON | |||
| 15:00 – 17:00 | Team activityCoffe break | Work session | In this interactive sessions the teams are working to solve their unique experiments and challenges |
| 17:00 – 17:30 | Coffee break | ||
| 17:30 – 18:30 | Team results presentations | Presentations | In this session the teams come back to the plenary setting and present their progress and solutions to the challenges |
| 18:30 – 19:00 | Discussion and wrap-up | Interactive work session | All lessons learned, outcomes, progress and solutions are condensed into a set of recommendations for future challenges |
Conclude your Winter School experience by reviewing all lessons learned in previous sessions and aligning with medium- and long-term objectives.
We will discuss important input for 2024-2026, contributions to the SRIA 2.0, and look beyond to 2027 to enhance the potential of the Horizon Europe EOSC-related projects.
Bios of the Metadata, Ontologies & Interoperability sub-committee
Projects
JOONAS KESÄNIEMI
FAIRCORE4EOSC
Joonas Kesäniemi works as a software architect for the IT Center for Science in Finland. He has spent more than a decade in the public and private sector advocating and putting linked data and semantic web technologies to work in production systems and in more experimental projects. Currently Joonas is developing the Metadata Schema and Crosswalk registry for the FAIRCORE4OESC project and contributing to the development of the research.fi, the national research information portal. As an “extracurricular activity” he is also pursuing a doctoral degree at the Aalto University in the area of data management in knowledge graphs.
CLEMENT JONQUET
FAIR-IMPACT
Dr. Clement Jonquet, PhD in Informatics, is senior researcher at INRAE in the MISTEA research unit and associate researcher at University of Montpellier in the LIRMM laboratory. He is a former postdoc (3 years) & visiting scholar (3 years) from Stanford BMIR. He has 16 years of experience in ontologies and semantic Web research applied to biomedicine and agronomy. He works on the design and development of ontology repositories, ontology-based services and FAIR semantic artefacts as the PI or Co-PI of several past or ongoing projects such as ANR D2KAB (www.d2kab.org) or HEU FAIR-IMPACT (www.fair-impact.eu) or the OntoPortal Alliance (https://ontoportal.org). Since 2015, he leads the AgroPortal initiative to build a reference vocabulary and ontology repository for agronomy, food and plant sciences. Dr. Jonquet is the (co)author of 130 publications or communications cumulating more than 3890 citations, including 28 international journals in multiple domains.
EOSC-A Task Forces
WOLMAR NYBERG ÅKERSTRÖM
TF Semantic Interoperability
Wolmar Nyberg Åkerström is an IT professional at Uppsala University and the National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden (NBIS) / ELIXIR Sweden. His work is focused around data management in international e-infrastructure initiatives and facilitating data sharing and reuse in Swedish life science research. Beyond the European research infrastructure ELIXIR, he is also engaged in the global Research Data Alliance (RDA) and the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC). As co-chair for the EOSC Semantic Interoperability TF, Wolmar also brings past experiences from working in digital scholarship, scholarly communication and digital repositories for research data, academic publications, and cultural heritage.
EOSC-A Board of Directors
KLAUS TOCHTERMANN
Klaus Tochtermann studied computer science in Kiel, Dortmund (Germany) and at Texas A&M (USA). From 2004 to 2010 KlausTochtermann was full professor for knowledge management and knowledge technologies at the Graz University of Technology (Austria). Since 2010, Klaus Tochtermann has been Director of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics in Kiel and Hamburg and holds a professorship for Digital Information Infrastructures at Kiel University. The ZBW is the world‘s largest information infrastructure for scientific information in economics, both online and offline.
His research focuses on Open Science, digital information infrastructures and research data management.
Klaus Tochtermann is involved in national and European committees and initiatives on
the topic of Open Science and research data management. These include the GO FAIR
initiative, which Germany launched together with the Netherlands and France to establish
the FAIR principles for research data. Among others, he is also a member of the scientific
senate of the National Research Data Infrastructure in Germany and a member of the Board of Directors of the European Open Science Cloud Association.
Coordination & Support
TEODOR IVÃNOAICA
EOSC Focus
Teodor Ivănoaica has more than 15 years of working experience in Large International Collaborations. As a Senior Officer for Scientific Computing and Data Management of ELI ERIC or representing Romania in the CERN LHCb National Computing Board, Teodor has actively participated in the development of Scientific Computing and IT Service Management Systems and Policies.
With a BSc and MSc in Physics and applied IT Techniques in Scientific Research, acting as Trainer in the IT Industry for more than 15 years, or Sr Systems Engineer or Grid/HPC computing engineer, for several large IT companies and research organizations, he developed a broad understanding of Scientific Data Practices, intellectual property and cybersecurity. All these experiences allow him to promote and support users and stakeholders to adopt and implement sustainable and reliable data services and computing infrastructures for various users and user communities.
His philosophy is that each data set provides diverse, complex information, therefore, from a complex dataset, one can see only the information he’s trained to see. Exposing the same dataset to a different user or user community will unlock new dimensions of the same dataset.