Merge pull request ResearchObject#511 from ResearchObject/blog-bh25de

Blog post from BioHackathon Germany 2025

Author: elichad

docs/_blog/2025-12-17/biohackathon-germany.md

@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
+---
+title:  "RO-Crate at the 4th BioHackathon Germany"
+author: ["Phil Reed"]
+date: 2025-12-17
+---
+
+The [4th BioHackathon Germany](https://www.denbi.de/de-nbi-events/1840-4th-biohackathon-germany) took place from 1-5 December 2025 in Walsrode, Germany, organised by de.NBI and ELIXIR Germany. 
+Life scientists, data managers, software developers and project leaders attended the hybrid event to work together on open source code, standards and infrastructure to advance research data pratices and tools.
+
+{% include image.html src="umbrellas.jpg" caption="BioHackathon Germany was hosted at the ANDERS Hotel Walsrode." alt="Colourful umbrellas mounted the ceiling as art." %}
+
+## Improving RO-Crate support in federated storage systems
+
+One of the hackathon projects was titled [Enhancing FAIR (Meta-)Data Practices in Life Science by Improving RO-Crates Support in Federated Storage Systems](https://das-abroxas.github.io/2025_Biohackathon_Documentation/project_description.html). 
+It was led by Sebastian Beyvers and Jannis Schlegel (University of Giessen).
+
+During their participation in the Biohackathon Germany 2025, their working group engaged in extensive discussions focused on the practical and technical challenges of integrating RO-Crates in federated storage systems for life science data. 
+The following list summarises the central questions and ideas that emerged from these collaborative sessions. 
+They reflect the real-world needs and obstacles faced by researchers and developers striving to advance FAIR data practices in distributed environments, and highlight areas where current standards and tooling may require further development.
+
+- Handling RO-Crates with extremely large datasets and integrated metadata (up to hundreds of megabytes of metadata, containing millions of entities)
+- Integrating content consistency checks in file metadata
+- Propagating metadata updates from top-level crates to referenced subcrates
+- Handling property conflicts in nested RO-Crates
+
+### Results
+
+The group produced many outputs which will be of immediate benefit to the community:
+
+- Extensions to [ro-crate-py](https://github.com/ResearchObject/ro-crate-py/pull/244) library: load most relevant subcrates of very large RO-Crates
+- Extensions to [ro-crate-rs](https://github.com/intbio-ncl/ro-crate-rs) library: interactive command line interface mode to traverse attached and detatched RO-Crates
+- Built an [RO-Crate indexing tool](https://github.com/arunaengine/rocrate-indexer) for easier exploration
+- Built the [RO-Crate Explorer](https://github.com/arunaengine/RO-Crate-Explorer), a demonstrator application to parse, visualise and traverse RO-Crates
+
+For full details, please visit the [BioHackathon Germany 2025 RO-Crate documentation](https://das-abroxas.github.io/2025_Biohackathon_Documentation/)

docs/_blog/2025-12-17/umbrellas.jpg

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       url: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rocrateR/index.html
     - name: GitHub source code
       url: https://github.com/ResearchObject/ro-crate-r/
+
+- name: rocrate-indexer
+  description: Indexing RO-Crates into a Tantivy search index
+  url: https://github.com/arunaengine/rocrate-indexer
+  status:
+
+- name: RO-Crate Explorer
+  description: A modern, interactive web application for exploring and visualizing RO-Crates, built with Vue 3.
+  url: https://github.com/arunaengine/RO-Crate-Explorer
+  status: