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 18 November 2016, a FAIR data hackathon was organised for Elsevier’s Mendeley open data repository.
Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help researchers organise their research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research. Earlier this year, ‘Mendeley Data’ was launched, an open data repository where researchers from all disciplines can deposit their datasets. The system allows all file formats and is flexible in the kinds of metadata researchers have to provide. However, it is important for others to be able to find, access, and work with the data. That is where FAIR comes in.
Hackathon
In the FAIR hackathon, developers from DTL joined the Mendeley Data developers for a hack day. The goal was to extend Mendeley Data API, to be able to expose the FAIR metadata, which allows researchers to discover datasets in Mendeley Data based on detailed metadata attributes.
Blogpost
In a Mendeley blogpost about the hackathon, Shruti Desai wrote:
“The outcomes of the hack day were: a much better understanding of how to make our datasets available as FAIR resources, so they can be found, integrated and reused by researchers along with other FAIR datasets; and creation of an endpoint which is only a few steps away from being productionised and available to use by the community.
We really enjoyed working closely with Luiz, DTL’s CTO, and developers Rajaram and Kees to concretely and tangibly make progress towards making Mendeley Data datasets more findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable! Follow Mendeley Twitter to hear when we launch this capability!”
More information
Read the full Mendeley blogpost. Further information on FAIR hackathons is available on the DTL website.