An ELIXIR Interoperability Platform KnowledgeHub

A significant amount of the work of the ELIXIR Interoperability Platform (EIP) is the dissemination of interoperability know-how, best practices, and use case examples, as well as the availability and applicability of resources for FAIR services in general and for interoperability in particular.

A systematic, sustainable approach to gathering and disseminating the collective knowledge of the Platform members and the outcomes of ELIXIR-related projects is needed, both internally to serve ELIXIR members and Nodes, and externally to researchers, infrastructure providers and projects that seek ELIXIR support.

The EIP Knowledge Hub is therefore proposed as a systematic approach to collate and disseminate knowledge, working in close partnership with the FAIR Services Architecture Framework to support and provide a dissemination forum for the outputs generated from Task 1.

The aim is to provide resources for both ELIXIR users and external researchers, and to act as a knowledge portal where researchers, ELIXIR communities, external projects and other RIs can find documentation on ELIXIR adopted services, resources, best practices and training materials.

Two major stakeholder communities with different knowledge dissemination routes will be addressed:

• Common practitioners, that is, data stewards, developers, and researchers, requiring knowledge of FAIR and interoperability best practices for Research Data management.
• Advanced practitioners in data stewardship and infrastructure and tool development that are developing ontologies, standards and FAIR services

To deliver the KnowledgeHub, we will use the ELIXIR RDMkit and the FAIR CookBook as components of the knowledge dissemination platform, thereby benefiting from their processes (using GitHub as the delivery mechanism) and their community momentum. For advanced practitioners, we will engage communities and additional ELIXIR-aligned projects that are creating content and have specific expertise. In both cases, a significant focus is placed on community-driven content contribution.

Both the RDMkit and the FAIR Cookbook have been designed from the start for long-term sustainability by the Nodes. The technical infrastructure is lightweight and off the shelf, with a light hosting footprint (web and GitHub).

The Norwegian node contributed in multiple ways to this activity:

• Created an RDMkit page for FAIRtracks highlighting its connection with other RIRs.
• Contributed to the joint editorial board of RDMkit and FAIR Cookbook.
• Contributed to a BioHackathon project on this very topic.
• Participated in the consolidation of the existing ecosystem from an interoperability point of view.