ELNs and OSTrails - Online Workshop

This workshop brings together developers and users of electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs) and the OSTrails project to explore how ELN workflows can connect with the OSTrails infrastructure for machine-actionable data management plans (maDMPs), scholarly knowledge graphs (SKGs), and FAIR assessment.

The event originates from a concrete use case: the German national pilot within OSTrails, led by RWTH Aachen University, where RDMO is being connected with the Chemotion Electronic Lab Notebook and repository to serve the NFDI4Chem and NFDI4Ing communities. The pilot focuses on creating machine-actionable DMP templates with embedded FAIR metrics, establishing qualified references between DMPs and lab notebooks, and enabling interoperability with the OpenAIRE Graph. The discussion in Braga during the Train-the-Trainer Bootcamp highlighted the broader relevance of this work for the project and the open science community at large.

ELNs are a critical point in the research data lifecycle. They are environments where researchers record experimental processes, capture data provenance, and generate the artefacts that DMPs are meant to track. Yet the connection between ELN systems and DMP tools remains largely manual and inconsistent. OSTrails' interoperability framework, spanning the DMP Interconnection Framework (DMP-IF), the SKG Interoperability Framework (SKG-IF), and FAIR Assessment capabilities, offers a principled basis for addressing this gap. This workshop is a first step towards mapping touching points, understanding each other's architectures, and identifying concrete collaboration opportunities.

Who should participate?

Everybody from the OSTrails project is invited to join. The workshop might be especially interesting for people, who want to know more about the functionalities of ELNs and possible interconnections with the work done in OSTrails.