News from the BrAPI Hackathon
In April 2024, the Leocorea in Lutherstadt Wittenberg in Germany hosted the latest edition of the BrAPI Hackathon, a collaborative event to advance data standards for plant science research. Co-organized by the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) Gatersleben and IBG-4 from Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, the meeting attracted 35 participants from 10 countries from Asia, Africa, America and Europe who worked on 15 projects over the course of the week.
The event, supported by sponsors IPK Gatersleben, FZJ, KWS, de.NBI and ELIXIR Germany, provided researchers and developers with a dynamic forum for focused project work and lively discussions. During the hackathon, participants discussed a range of important topics. These included an introduction to BrAPI, which provided newcomers with essential insights into the application of BrAPI in plant science. Participants also reviewed and refined the BrAPI domain model to ensure its robustness and usability in different research contexts. Investigations into the integration of BrAPI into genebank repositories highlighted opportunities to improve data management and accessibility within these important resources. Discussions on security protocols and authentication mechanisms addressed important considerations for securing BrAPI data integrity. There was also a presentation on Annotated Research Context Data Model as a variant for representing data as a file system. Insights from INRAE highlighted applications of BrAPI for high-throughput phenotyping and demonstrated the versatility of the platform for cutting-edge research methods. Another focus was the planning for the release of the BrAPI version 2 manuscript.
The hackathon also facilitated collaborative design sessions to further develop the features planned for BrAPI version 2.2. Finally, discussions focused on the definition and use of standardized datasets for analytical purposes, providing the basis for improved data-driven insights within plant science.
The outcomes of the BrAPI Hackathon are expected to shape the future development of BrAPI, and several project teams have committed to continuing their work beyond the event. Continued collaboration and engagement within the growing BrAPI community promises further innovation in plant science data standards.
For more information about BrAPI and upcoming events, visit the official BrAPI website .
A report from Sebastian Beier1, Gouripriya Davuluri2, Manuel Feser2, Patrick König2, Stephan Weise2 1 Institute of Bio- and Geosciences (IBG-4: Bioinformatics), Bioeconomy Science Center (BioSC), CEPLAS, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Jülich, Germany
2 Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK), Gatersleben, Germany
Since 2014, the Breeding API (BrAPI) project aims to increase interoperability among plant breeding web resources. It represents a standardized RESTful web service API specification for communicating plant data. The project is maintained by the BrAPI coordinator Peter Selby at the Cornell University. Over the years the BrAPI community grew to 200 software developers and agricultural scientists from 36 international.
REST: Representational State Transfer
API: Application Programming Interface