HMC Conference 2026: Metadata in Action

Advancing interoperability, infrastructure, and collaboration in research

From 28 – 30 April 2026, the second in-person HMC Conference 2026 took place in Heidelberg, hosted at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ). Over three days, nearly 200 participants from 65 institutions came together to exchange ideas, share experiences, and explore how metadata is actively shaping research in practice.

The programme reflected the breadth and relevance of the topic: 23 talks, 44 posters, 19 demos, and 10 workshops highlighted developments ranging from interoperability and semantic integration to human–machine collaboration and research infrastructures.

The conference opened with a diverse pre-conference workshop programme, offering space for hands-on sessions, focused discussions, and collaborative exchange. Topics ranged from FAIR Digital Objects and semantic technologies to metadata quality, data integration, and metadata harmonisation, highlighting the demand for practical formats that connect technical and scientific perspectives.

The official opening in the afternoon marked the beginning of the main programme, shaped by both strategic perspectives and practical approaches to metadata in action. The keynote by Marta Teperek (Open Science NL) and Dani Metilli (TDCC) emphasised that making FAIR data a reality requires more than technical solutions: it calls for a cultural shift across the research ecosystem. The first conference day continued with a session on metadata in research infrastructures and approaches to embedding quality and context into research workflows sparking lively discussions.

Another major highlight of the day was the poster and demo session, which created many opprtunities for discussions and hands-on exchange around ongoing projects and emerging ideas. The day concluded with the Welcome Reception, offering participants an opportunity to continue conversations and strengthen connections in an informal atmosphere.

Interoperability took centre stage on the second conference day – one of the central challenges for modern research infrastructures. Talks and discussions explored how software systems, metadata, and ontologies need to work together as interconnected layers. Contributions on ontology-driven approaches and metadata harmonisation lead to lively debates on scalability and cross-domain integration. Practical examples, including work in the NFDI4Health context on mapping multiple standards, demonstrated how interoperability challenges can be tackled in real-world research settings.

A key message of the day was captured in the keynote by Jan Portisch (SAP): “90% data and semantics, 10% AI.” This perspective resonated strongly with participants, highlighting the importance of robust data foundations, integration, and semantic structures for enabling meaningful innovation.

Another highlight was the poster and demo session, which once again created space for deeper discussions and new perspectives. The booth area featured the HMC booth together with our sister platforms from the Helmholtz Information and Data Science (HIDS) Framework, namely Helmholtz AI, Helmholtz Imaging, HIFIS. The day concluded with a joint boat cruise on the Neckar River, offering an inspiring setting to continue discussions and strengthen connections within the community.

The final day turned the spotlight toward scientific infrastructures and future developments. In his keynote, Oliver Stegle (DKFZ, GHGA, EMBL) demonstrated how large-scale genomic research depends on well-structured, interoperable metadata to connect datasets, enable reproducibility, and support analysis at scale. His talk underlined that metadata is not just supportive, but foundational for modern research infrastructures. It also highlighted that the boundary between research data and metadata is contextual and shaped by disciplinary perspective and use case.

The concluding session on human–machine collaboration explored how metadata acquisition is evolving through automation, robotics, and AI-supported approaches. Discussions revealed how strongly many challenges – and successes – resonate across disciplines, reinforcing the value of bringing diverse perspectives together and learning from one another.

The conference concluded with the official wrap-up and award ceremony, celebrating outstanding demo and poster contributions and the creativity, expertise, and commitment behind them. We congratulate all awardees and thank all contributors for shaping a rich, diverse, and engaging programme.

The HMC community left Heidelberg with new insights, strengthened connections, and a renewed sense of how central metadata has become for enabling modern, collaborative, and reproducible research. We sincerely thank all participants, speakers, contributors, and organisers for their engagement – and look forward to continuing the discussion beyond the conference.

HMC Conference 2026 showed how metadata comes to life in practice – and how “Metadata in Action” brings people, ideas, and research communities together to shape the future of science.

You can find a full overview on the HMC Conference 2026 Webpage. All conference papers can be found in the Book of Abstracts. In addition, many contributions have also been published in our conference-community on Zenodo