Successful HMC Summer Meeting

From 3 to 5 July, the largest meeting of the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC) platform to date took place at GEOMAR with 90 participants. For the first time, all 28 HMC projects funded by the Helmholtz Initiative and Networking Fund (IVF) were present, as well as members of the Scientific Advisory Board and Steering Board, representatives of the other HIDS platforms and the Helmholtz Head Office. The aim of the event was a personal exchange on the challenges arising from the increasing demands on the documentation of high-quality research data.

At the summer meeting, solutions were presented that had already been developed and in some cases are already usable in order to realise HMC's vision of a shared Helmholtz data space in which data can be easily found, shared, exchanged and used. These ranged from metadata training courses to community portals, events on the topics of metadata and FAIR, and metadata tools, such as the ‘somesy tool, which can already be used and is available to the public in the Helmholtz Research Directory. Other resources that have already been developed were also presented, such as the HMC FAIR Dashboard, which allows statistics on open and FAIR data produced by Helmholtz researchers to be viewed and interactively analysed. Or the Helmholtz Knowledge Graph, a central resource that brings together metadata from data providers such as repositories and libraries from the entire Helmholtz Association and whose datasets can already be searched.

Last but not least, the meeting was also used as an opportunity for HMC projects to present themselves. The six new HMC projects, which were only selected last year as part of the HMC project call and have only recently officially started their work, introduced themselves. However, previous years also took the opportunity to present their (initial) results, such as the ‘Stamplate’ project, which is developing a networked research data infrastructure for time series in the field of environmental sciences.

To summarise the summer meeting, it can be said that it provided the perfect opportunity to exchange ideas personally and constructively, to discover and create new synergies and to discuss further necessary steps and solutions that are required to implement HMC's vision in the coming years in a targeted manner.

‘The HMC summer meeting at GEOMAR was a great opportunity to get to know the variety of programmes, projects and, of course, the people behind them - for the first time on this size. The quality of the contributions at the meeting showed that we rightly have the perspective to develop HMC for another five years,’ says Sören Lorenz, HMC spokesperson and Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Head of the Information, Data and Computing Centre at GEOMAR.