If you want to go far go together - Collaborative research supported by NanoCommons transnational access

On Tuesday, 9th Nov 2021, the NanoCommons team, in a joint initiative with the NanoSafety Cluster, offered an online webinar on the use of their Nanoinformatics data services & tools accessible via the NanoCommons Infrastructure and Knowledge Base (NC KB).

Hosts: Christine Balmer, UKCEH, UK, Beatriz Alfaro-Serrano, BNN, AT, Martin Himly, PLUS, AT, Chair of NanoSafety Cluster WG-A on Education, Training, and Communication

The H2020 research e-infrastructure project NanoCommons is fostering collaborative research by trying to bring the nanosafety community together to work hands-on on the establishment of ways to make data and software platforms, developed in the different projects, to talk to each other. In order to give this a major push, we organised a workshop where, first, different organisations, that have already applied for Transnational Access (TA) projects with NanoCommons, reported about their experiences. This was followed by presentations on how the learnings from these projects resulted in collaboration and interoperability concepts, which could be extended to span across different tools and platforms, and on the upcoming training activities of NanoCommons and other possible follow-ups to this workshop.

This workshop showcased how NanoCommons could support all of you, individually and as a group, as independent data harmoniser, platform harmoniser (e.g. through joint APIs, containerisation solutions, etc.) and overall data/metadata consultant not creating new tools or replacing existing solutions but to bring all these closer together so that they can be combined into integrated workflows. This could be based on common metadata and data standards, linking of data warehouses, workflow tools (KNIME, Jupyter) and deployment options to combine different services with complementary features. This could also be supplemented by ways of collaborative dissemination of the results from the projects and knowledge sharing like common service catalogues, training and knowledge platforms and the shared usage of applications like electronic lab notebooks. These are just some first thought-starters but of course we are open to hearing your needs and even more important things you could / would like to bring in.

Attached here you find the pdf of the entire webinar slide set. The webinar recording is amongst others available online at the NanoCommons YouTube channel, for a direct link to the recordings of this event click here.

Furthermore, you find additional information on related trainings at the NanoCommons Infrastructure, in the NanoCommons Customer Guidance Handbook, and at the ELIXIR TeSS channel of NanoCommons.