Solutions for promoting open science practices developed in a challenge event
Picture: Pinja Ahola / CSC
The WIDE – Open Source Science challenge and hackathon was held on 26–28 October. The aim of the challenge is to promote open science. The event was held at Leipätehdas in Helsinki and was jointly organised by Helsinki Think Company, National Library of Finland, the University of Helsinki IT Center and CSC.
WIDE consists of two tracks: a multidisciplinary concept design competition and a more technical challenge focused on coding. A large number of participants entered both challenges: 55 participants formed 15 teams, each with their own approach and idea for solving the challenge.
The participants developed solutions all through Saturday and Sunday, during which time mentors from the organisations arranging the event provided them with support for solving their challenges. The event culminated in a final on Sunday, 29 October, when teams presented their solutions and prizes were awarded to the best ideas.
Consolidating, updating and expanding data
The winner of the multidisciplinary challenge was a knowledge crystal website, which offers editable scientific information to researchers, politicians and citizens. The knowledge crystal website stores published research data and makes it openly available to everyone. The solution serves not only citizens, but also, for example, politicians, who are given access to all the data they need in a single location, while being able to verify the timeliness of the data. The team responsible for developing the knowledge crystal website was Jouni Tuomisto, Kaisa Haverinen, Juha-Pekka Finnilä and Teemu Ropponen.
Picture: Tapio Auvinen
The winner of the technical solution was a browser extension, which helps the user find written works on the Finna.fi search service. The user can freely choose any text found on a webpage and the extension will automatically suggest works related to the selected text excerpt and its topic. The browser was developed by Steve Nebo, Yazan Al Halabi and Akangbe Samuel.
Picture: Tapio Auvinen
Open solutions on behalf of science
In keeping with the principle of the event, all solutions developed during the weekend are shared openly on the GitHub development platform. In addition to this, the best teams received support from the challenge organisers to further develop their solutions.
– The hackathon was truly inspiring. There was a whole lot of excellent discussion on open science and increasing the impact of research data. For example, in the multidisciplinary New Frontiers, there were some really interesting concepts on bringing researchers to public libraries as well as providing information search support to civil servants using an open process and artificial intelligence. I really hope that every idea will be tried out, explains multidisciplinary challenge judge and speaker Jessica Parland-von Essen from CSC.
More info:
• WIDE – Open Source Science website
• CSC WIDE challenge pages
• WIDE – promoting the openness and accessibility of science
National Library of Finland press release "Politiikan kristallipallo ja selainlaajennos tiedon etsimiseen – haastekilpailussa luotiin uusia ratkaisuja tieteen avoimuuden edistämiseen" (in Finnish, published 28 October 2018) was used as the news source for this article.