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The event was supported by INRAE, DigitAg and the Labex NUMEV. There were 27 participants: 6 coaches and 11 competing teams.

The twenty or so participants were able to test 6 tools and methods for assessing the level of FAIRness (or compliance with the FAIR principles) on resources of their choice. Accompanied by 6 coaches directly involved in the development of the tools and methods, the participants calculated a first score. With the help of the coaches, they then reworked the description of the resources, in particular the metadata, in order to improve this score. The final ranking was based on the teams that obtained the highest differential between the initial score and the final score.

 The participants had 4 automatic tools at their disposal, including :

• • 2 generalists : FAIR-checker and F-UJI
  • 2 dedicated to semantic resources: O'FAIRE and FOOPS!
  • 2 questionnaires/self-assessment methods : SHARC and the Recommandations FAIRsFAIR

Nearly 20 resources (datasets, ontologies and thesauri) were screened with tools and questionnaires. All the teams increased their FAIRNess scores obtained during the AgroHackathon with an average increase of around 10% (once the metrics were normalised).

The overall feedback was very positive: for the coaches, who were confronted with a wide variety of real-life cases brought to them by local users; for the competitors, who became more familiar with the tools and more aware of the FAIR principles.

Among the impressions and comments made at the end of the hackathon, the following can be noted:

• The importance of the identifiers used to be clear on what is given as input to a tool (descriptive web page, URI, DOI)
• A great need for harmonisation of metadata (what properties and values are expected, what vocabulary is recommended?)
• The importance of detailing the indicators/criteria evaluated and how to intervene on this evaluation by changing the resource
• The difference between tools/methods that exploit (or not) the content of resources and not only their metadata
• The need to illustrate more with examples (in the interfaces of the tools).
• The need to reflect in the interfaces on the new use case created by the tools: deposit - evaluate - correct and so on
• The proposal to harmonise the results from one tool to another.

This event, supported by the FooSIN project, was a "pilot" and we plan to reproduce this type of "FAIRness hackathon" competition in different forms, with other FAIRness assessment tools and of course beyond the agri-food theme. The context of the Horizon Europe FAIR-IMPACT project, which focuses on the adoption of FAIR principles in EOSC, will be ideal to reproduce this type of event on another scale!

Find more information on the event website.