Funding of 8 new HMC projects confirmed
Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC) platform is pleased to announce the successful completion of its fifth project call - the HMC Project Call 2024. A total of €3.17 million in funding has been allocated to eight exceptional projects, which will receive financial support over the next two years. Of this amount, €1.58 million comes from the Helmholtz Initiative and Networking Fund, with the remaining funds provided by the participating Helmholtz Centres.
The annual HMC project call plays a crucial role in addressing practical challenges in research data documentation, advancing metadata generation for research data across the Helmholtz Association, and promoting the implementation of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles both within Helmholtz and beyond.
The 2024 year’s call received 21 high-quality proposals, reinforcing its reputation as a highly regarded and unique funding opportunity. Interdisciplinarity remains a core feature of the funded projects, with many involving collaboration across multiple research fields. Moreover, the call continues to strengthen connections between research teams across different Helmholtz Centres – 12 of the 18 Helmholtz Centres are involved in the eight funded projects, with six acting as coordinating centres.
Another noteworthy aspect is that nearly half of the proposals submitted were resubmissions from previous HMC project calls. By incorporating feedback from prior reviewers, half of these resubmitted projects have successfully secured HMC funding.
The eight newly funded projects, which will begin their work within the next months, focus on several metadata-specific topics, including:
Interoperability & Standards: Integrating Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) with RO-Crates and developing behavioral metadata standards for video tracking assays.
Ontology-Based Search & Representation: Enhancing data retrieval through semantic search, agent-based multimodal workflows, and structured knowledge systems.
AI & Automated Metadata Management: Implementing AI-assisted categorization, automated IGSN handling, and domain-specific metadata harvesting.
FAIR Data & Reusability: Strengthening cross-disciplinary metadata alignment and reuse, particularly in microbiome research.
For more details on the newly funded projects and their objectives, please visit our overview of all HMC projects.
Background information:
With an annual HMC Call for Projects, HMC promotes the target-oriented development of tools and solutions for metadata handling. The projects serve as important use cases for the Helmholtz community, their results are integrated into HMC activities and are thus available to the entire Helmholtz Association. Projects can be funded for a maximum of 2 years and are financed with a maximum of €200,000 from the Helmholtz Association's Initiative and Networking Fund. Funded Helmholtz Centres must co-finance at least 50% of the respective project.
The Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration is one of five platforms of the Helmholtz Information & Data Science (HIDS) Framework. The aim of HMC is to enable the enrichment of research data through metadata in the various phases of its creation as well as to develop and implement concepts and services for this purpose.
