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Training portals are relevant to multiple target groups. For instance, training providers can use them to advertise training events and news, and to distribute materials in catalogues. Trainers can use them to share materials and event information, and trainees can use them to identify relevant training events and resources, as well as performing specific, guided analysis tasks via customised training workflows and curated learning paths. However, the growing amount of training portals and materials means they are all facing the same challenge. Training materials must be described with relevant metadata in a FAIR way. During this project, we will address this challenge by extending the Training eSupport System (TeSS) through the integration of components from Terminology Services 4 NFDI (TS4NFDI).
With its focus on providing a one-stop shop for trainers and trainees to discover online information and content, including events and interactive tutorials, TeSS is the perfect showcase portal. Furthermore, TeSS is used as the basis for training catalogues in different knowledge domains such asELIXIR TeSS (life sciences, the original instance), PaN-Training (photon and neutron science), and HEP Training (high energy physics). The TeSS software can interoperate and exchange content between TeSS based instances as well as with non-TeSS training catalogues mostly through Bioschemas / schemas.science metadata, which provides interoperability on a property level. For the values for each property, however, many of these training catalogues use specific vocabularies that are integrated through custom implementations. This requires additional maintenance work and limits interoperability when mappings and upper level alignments are not supported. Also, many fields still don’t use widely adopted vocabularies in general. This is where the components of TS4NFDI can help. TS4NFDI service seeks to integrate and converge individual solutions into a standardized, interoperable, and sustainable architecture. In order to accomplish these objectives, TS4NFDI provides the following components: a Terminology Service Suite, a centralized API Gateway, and a mapping service.
The Terminology Service Suite is a collection of interactive widgets designed to ease the integration of terminology service functions into third-party applications, such as TeSS. As mentioned above TeSS has been widely adopted in many knowledge domains, the TS4NFDI API Gateway could provide a flexible, sophisticated solution to this challenge. This is because the API Gateway can make federated calls across multiple terminology services from different domains and provide domain-specific information via terminology collections in its responses. As different communities use different terms for the same concept, mappings between these terms could enhance the search functionality of TeSS.
The project will focus on the following three objectives: 1) improving the terminology support for metadata fields in TeSS, 2) extending semantic search functionality of TeSS, 3) formulating a generalisable mapping strategy that can be applied in other contexts and domains, with TeSS/TS4NFDI as a use case. To achieve these objectives, the Terminology Service Suite, the API Gateway and the Mapping Service have to interact with TeSS. For quality control of the new integrated functionality we will use the feedback of users of TeSS instances mentioned above.
During the BioHackathon Germany the project team will organise 'Audience Can Ask Anything' sessions to introduce participants interested in the BioHackathon to TeSS and the TS4NFDI service components.