Challenge(s) accepted! NFDI hackathon "DataXplorers" has started

Six challenging data management projects and participants from more than 20 specialist areas: The start of the DataXplorers Hackathon makes us excited for the December unveiling of the results.

On Monday, October 23, we kicked off our "DataXplorers" hackathon. A total of 53 interested people responded to the call and took part in the lively virtual event, in which the six exciting and completely different projects ("challenges") were presented. The audience consisted of scientists who had registered in advance for one of the challenges, as well as other interested parties from the communities. After the official program, the participants had the opportunity to exchange ideas with the challenge providers in small groups to discuss the further process.

Who is behind the DataXplorers Hackathon?

The DataXplorers Hackathon is jointly organised by the three NFDI consortia NFDI4Biodiversity, NFDI4Earth and NFDI4Microbiota. In the NFDI (National Research Data Infrastructure), we are working on legally compliant, interoperable and sustainable data infrastructures that are easily accessible for researchers in their day-to-day work. The aim is to improve data utilisation options for science and society. The NFDI consists of 26 specialised consortia and a network of consortia (Base4NFDI). 

NFDI4Biodiversity, NFDI4Earth and NFDI4Microbiota are three of these 26 specialist consortia and together unite the communities of biodiversity and environmental research, earth system sciences and microbiology. The hackathon is organised by the NFDI4Earth Academy, which is dedicated to the education and training of young scientists from the Earth system sciences with a focus on data science. The infrastructure that enables participants to work on their topics from home is provided by our partner de.NBI, the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure. 

What is the DataXplorers Hackathon all about? 

The DataXplorers Hackathon focusses on topics and data that are important across the community. The challenges are organised and supervised by partners from the three consortia. As already mentioned, we are offering a total of six completely different challenges.

In the Q&A session, the participants answered which disciplines they come from and why they are taking part in the hackathon.

Challenge 1, organised by our partners at Bielefeld University, is about the partial automation of the image and video annotation software BIIGLE. A nice report about the functionalities and possibilities of BIIGLE can be read here.

Two partners have joined forces for Challenge 2: the Bavarian State Archives Directorate General and the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development (IOER). The aim of the challenge is the automatic colour inspection of directories or collections of scanned historical maps (e.g. bog maps), their sorting according to colour information and the determination of land use classes.

In Challenge 3, participants work on programming a bot that answers questions about research data management based on a natural language model. The challenge is supervised by partners of TU Dresden.

Challenge 4 is offered by our partners at Justus Liebig University Giessen and deals with the complementation of the ARUNA Object Storage.

Hackathon participants can experiment with their own data and merge it with other data in Challenge 5. Climate and biodiversity data can be displayed and analysed in so-called data cubes. The challenge is organised by the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry.

In Challenge 6, supervised by the Leibniz Institute for Analytical Sciences (ISAS), the participants are working on a user-friendly web service for the annotation of metaproteomic experiments.  

Further information on the challenges can be found on the DataXplorers website. The results of the challenges will be made available afterwards.

Who are the "data explorers"?

A total of 31 scientists from 15 institutions each registered for one of the challenges. A casual round of questions during the kick-off also revealed that the participants came from a wide variety of parts of our communities. In addition to the fun factor, the main motivation for taking part in the hackathon was to gain experience and enjoy the challenge.

What happens next?

The participants have a total of six weeks to work on their project. Afterwards, the presentation of the project results will take place on 5 December in Frankfurt am Main. Interested parties are welcome to register online. The Zoom registration link can be found here. More information can be found on the DataXplorers Website.