In addition to Bring Your Own Data workshops (which focus on making research data FAIR), DTL regularly organises so-called ‘FAIR data hackathons‘. These events aim to make research tools FAIR. On 19 and 20 October 2016, a FAIR data hackathon was organised for the MOLGENIS system.
The MOLGENIS system consists of several software tools for scientific data management, including the MOLGENIS/connect tool, which is a semi-automatic system to find, match and pool data from different biobanks.
Hackathon
On 19 and 20 October 2016, developers from the MOLGENIS team at UMCG and DTL’s FAIR data team jointly built a first proof of concept of making MOLGENIS FAIR. Two developers for tranSMART and PhenotypeDB also were present at the hackathon because they want to prepare a similar hackathon for these tools. The hackathon focused on implementing the FAIR Data Point (FDP) API in MOLGENIS. (An FDP is software that allows data owners to expose datasets in a FAIR manner and allows data users to discover meta-data and, if license conditions allow, to actually access the data.) The team leveraged the flexibility of the MOLGENIS data model to implement the underlying structure.
Successful
David van Enckevort of UMCG: “At the end of the hackathon, we had successfully implemented the FDP API and were able to publish any dataset in MOLGENIS as a FAIR Data Point. As a next step, we will professionalise the code that we made during the hackathon, so that it can be included in MOLGENIS 2. In addition, we want to use it as a tool for the RD-Connect Data Linkage plan and the BBMRI-NL Biobank catalogue.”
More information
- News item about MOLGENIS/connect
- Interview with Morris Swertz about the Data4lifesciences work package ‘Access to data and sample collections’