Project 23: Improving Bioschemas creation and community adoption through process improvements and tool development, and advancing compliance to FAIR standards
Bioschemas is a grassroots community effort to improve the FAIRness of web-based resources in the Life sciences by defining domain-specific metadata schemas which, when adopted, expose key metadata properties from resource records, aiding users to find data quickly, accurately and efficiently.
During the Biohackathon Europe 2022, we focused on improving our tooling, particularly to facilitate the Bioschemas Profile development process by automating the usage of outputs from the Data Discovery Engine (DDE)--a tool for creating, registering and editing schemas. Since then, we have been engaging with communities interested in updating Bioschemas profiles and types and have updated many Bioschemas profiles. While the process to create and update profiles is now in production, the process to create entirely new ‘types’ leaves a glaringly missing piece in the adoption by entirely new communities. Hence, there is a disconnect between profiles (which can be updated by community members) and the types upon which these profiles are built (which can require technical expertise).
To improve the accessibility and value of Bioschemas to existing and emerging communities, we will address the issues in the Bioschemas profile and type development process, improve the tooling and documentation around Bioschemas validation and usage, and assist community members and resource providers in implementing or developing Bioschemas profiles and types by actively ‘hacking’ with already identified groups who are also submitting proposals.
This project is based on a previously successful Biohackathon project. The short-term goal of refining documentation and having and developing an automated workflow for Bioschemas types is expected to be achievable within the duration of the hackathon.
Extensive testing and adoption of the automated workflow for types is expected to take place within 3 months after the hackathon, with full implementation by 6 months post-hackathon.
Minimally, at least two people with programming expertise would be needed to clone and adopt the automated workflow for types. At least one person with no technical expertise is desired for refining the documentation.
Tools for markup validation already exist and/or are in development, and at least one person with no technical expertise would be needed for testing these tools in a Bioschemas context.
As with the previous Biohackathon, we anticipate engaging with members of other projects to meet the goals of this one.
Ginger Tsueng, Nick Juty, Alban Gaignard