From 08.04.24 - 10.04.24, the "Hands-On Symposium on ARC Communication and Interoperability" was hosted by DataPLANT in Boppard. This symposium was an integrative event, bringing together experts from various National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) consortia, namely FAIRagro, NFDI4BioImage, DataPLANT, and NFDI4Biodiversity. The focus was on the Annotated Research Context ARC, a framework designed to encapsulate research data and metadata in a FAIR manner.

The primary objective of the symposium was to enhance interoperability between the ARC and other research data standards. Besides the technical aspect, the focus was put on the ARC specification itself and on means of communicating this standard. An ARC is intended to capture research data, analysis and metadata and their evolution in scenarios ranging from single experimental setups to complex experimental designs in plant biological research. Toward this, ARCs combine existing standards, leveraging the properties of the ISA metadata model, for administrative and experimental metadata and the Common Workflow Language (CWL) to represent processing specifications.

The symposium featured introductory talks about the current state of the specification and tooling. Especially ARCtrl, a cross-programming-language toolkit for creation, manipulation and conversion of ARCs was presented. plays a significant role in streamlining the different approaches for interoperating with the ARC. In order to gather feedback and requirements from the community, discussion sessions were held separately as well as accompanied by talks. Here, participants got to know each others projects, fostering mutual understanding and finding overlapping areas of interest.

A significant portion of the event was dedicated to collaborative hacking sessions. These sessions provided a practical, hands-on experience for the participants, allowing them to directly engage with the ARC framework and implement it. This approach not only facilitated a better understanding of the ARCs, but also encouraged the sharing of ideas and solutions among the diverse group of experts present. The results of the hacking-sessions are described below in the outcomes section and can be browsed in more detail in the different folders of this repository.

The "Hands-On Symposium on ARC Communication and Interoperability" marked another step towards achieving greater harmony among different data management systems within the NFDI. By bringing together a wide array of experts and fostering a collaborative environment, the symposium not only addressed immediate interoperability challenges but also set the stage for ongoing advancements in the field of research data management.

As ARCs continue to evolve, regular communication between the affiliated research data experts will remain a central instrument moving forward in FAIRification of research.