Hacking Infrastructures Together: Towards better interoperability of infrastructures

The BiCIKL Project is born from a vision that biodiversity data are most useful if they are viewed as a network of data that can be integrated and viewed from different starting points. BiCIKL’s goal is to realize that vision by linking biodiversity data infrastructures, particularly for literature, molecular sequences, specimens, nomenclature and analytics. BiCIKL is an Open Science project creating Open FAIR data and services for the whole research community. BiCIKL intends to inspire novel, innovative, research and build services that can produce new and valuable knowledge, necessary for the protection of biodiversity and of our environment. BiCIKL will develop methods and workflows to harvest, link and access data extracted from literature. Yet, as the project gets underway, we need to better understand the existing infrastructures, their limitations, the nature of the data they hold, the services they provide and particularly how they can interoperate. To do this we organised a week-long hackathon where small teams worked on a number of pilot projects (Table 1) that were chosen to test the existing linkages between infrastructures and to extract novel ones. We will present our experience of running a hackathon and our evaluation of how successfully it achieved its aims. We will also give examples of the projects we conducted and how successful they were. Finally we will give our preliminary evaluation of what we learned about the interoperability of infrastructures and what recommendations we can give to improve their interoperability, whether that is improvements to the data standards used, the means to access the data and analyse them, or even the physical bandwidth and computational restrictions that limit the potential for research.