Join the 4th BioHackathon Germany

Mattea Müller
2025-09-29

Join the 4th BioHackathon Germany

The German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (de.NBI) is calling for participants to join the 4th BioHackathon Germany, taking place December 1st-5th, 2025, in Walsrode. This collaborative coding event brings together software developers, bioinformatics researchers and data scientists to tackle pressing challenges in life science data management and infrastructure. Registration is now open, with seats for on-site participation being limited. The event follows the de.NBI/ELIXIR Germany Code of Conduct to ensure a respectful and safe environment for all participants.

Enhancing RO-Crates Support in Federated Storage

Among the exciting projects on offer is “Enhancing FAIR (Meta-)Data Practices in Life Science by Improving RO-Crates Support in Federated Storage Systems” supervised by de.NBI colleague Sebastian Beyvers and NFDI4Microbiota member Jannis Schlegel. This project addresses a part of the critical challenge in modern life sciences: how to effectively manage, share, and reuse the growing volumes of research data across federated storage infrastructures while maintaining data sovereignty and institutional control. The team will work on improving Research Object Crates (RO-Crates) tooling to better support automated ingestion and extraction processes in distributed storage architectures. Primary focus will be on developing an enhanced RO-Crate implementation that can handle both attached and detached formats, as well as paginated RO-Crates for large-scale research objects that exceed traditional packaging limits. This work will directly benefit various research communities by enabling comprehensive metadata descriptions while accommodating the practical constraints of distributed storage systems and network transfer limitations.

Strategic Impact on NFDI

The success of this project holds significance for all scientific communities currently using or planning to adopt the RO-Crate format (e.g. NFDI4Microbiota in its envisioned infrastructure). Enhanced RO-Crate support will strengthen native metadata handling capabilities across research infrastructures, directly contributing to improved FAIR data practices in diverse scientific disciplines. The project’s focus on federated data storage solutions, demonstrated through platforms like Aruna (also developed within NFDI4Microbiota), will serve as a validation testbed for enhanced RO-Crate workflows that can benefit the broader research community beyond any single consortium or field.

To register and learn more about all available projects, visit the official event page or contact the organizers directly.

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