On the 19-21st of September 2018, EUDAT organised its first hackathon to advance the integration of the B2 service data discovery and metadata management in Hamburg, Germany. These topics were addressed on the basis of two use cases resulting from the EOSC-hub project: the enhancement of Herbadrop, an innovative approach to long-term preservation and analysis of digitised herbarium specimens, with data discovery tools; and the equipment of CompBioMed, the Centre of Excellence in computational biomedicine, with data replication facilities.

During the hackathon work focused on:

  1. Advance in discoverability of research data stored within the CDI, by making data and metadata stored in B2SAFE harvestable by B2FIND. This was addressed in two ways:
    • The first approach was to extend the integration of B2SAFE with B2SHARE, having B2SAFE automatically create data records in B2SHARE while data remains stored in B2SAFE. During the hackathon an initial concept of the integration was demonstrated. The advantage of this approach is that metadata stored in B2SAFE is automatically made harvestable through B2SHARE by B2FIND.
    • The second approach discussed was to directly harvest from a metadata store in which metadata is located from data stored in B2SAFE. This approach has been adopted in the Herbadrop use case, where metadata is store in a triple store. To enable this, B2FIND harvesting methods needed to be extended to support harvesting from a triple store.
  2. A second related topic was the standardisation of the minimum metadata schemas across the EUDAT services B2SHARE and B2FIND. This will help the efficiency of metadata harvesting from B2SHARE to B2FIND and will standardise the minimum requirements for communities to make data discovery within the EUDAT CDI domain.