We invite you to submit your pitches for the 4th SWAT4HCLS Biohackathon! The main event will take place on March 26. To facilitate preparation, we will provide a dedicated room for participants from March 23 to 25 during the tutorials and conference talks. This space will serve as a collaborative hub for brainstorming and refining ideas leading up to the Biohackathon.
You are encouraged to suggest Biohackathon topics through the following submission form. All proposed topics will be showcased on our website, emphasizing the cross-pollination of ideas that is integral to our event. Participants are urged to draw inspiration from one another and collaborate by merging concepts whenever possible.
We also welcome attendees from past and sister biohackathons, such as the DBCLS Biohackathon, to continue developing their ongoing projects during this edition. Many impactful serial biohack efforts are worth pursuing further.
Similar to previous editions, results can be reported on BioHackRxiv. For example, “BioHackSWAT4HCLS25: Towards AI-Ready for the Life-Sciences” illustrates work that spans multiple biohackathons.
Preliminary Program for the Biohackathon 2026
- March 23: Unscheduled hacking and collaboration in the dedicated room
- March 24: Unscheduled hacking and collaboration in the dedicated room
- March 25: Unscheduled hacking and collaboration in the dedicated room
- March 26:
- 09:00 – 10:00: Walk-in
- 10:00 – 11:00: Pitches & Invitations for Collaboration
- 11:00 – 15:00: Hack, Hack, Hack!
- 15:00 – 16:00: Presentations of Results
We look forward to welcoming you to the next SWAT4HCLS Biohackathon in Amsterdam!
BioHackathon 2026 – Received Project Pitches
We are pleased to announce the first set of project pitches received for the upcoming SWAT4HCLS BioHackathon 2026. Below is an overview of the currently accepted pitches, please don’t hesitate to provide more through the submission form.
We thank all proposers for their thoughtful submissions and look forward to further pitches. We are still actively receiving new project pitches through the submission form mentioned above, and we warmly encourage additional contributions.
If you would like to join one of these projects or simply participate in the BioHackathon, please register using the registration section above.
Received hack topic suggestions:
- From DCAT to HealthDCAT-AP: Comparative Analysis of National Healthcare Metadata Catalog Schemas to Enable Federated Interoperability in Europe
- OpenMRS as a Living Lab: Linking EHRs to the Semantic Web for Personalized Medicine
- Bring Your Concepts: Creating Reusable Meaning Mappings for Health Data Interoperability
- Microscopy Metadata Meets Semantic Web
- Your suggestion could have been here. Submit your hack topic here.
From DCAT to HealthDCAT-AP: Comparative Analysis of National Healthcare Metadata Catalog Schemas to Enable Federated Interoperability in Europe
Proposers: Vasundra Touré; Deepak Unni; Núria Queralt-Rosinach; Bruna Dos Santos Viera; Judith Wodke; Thomas Ganslandt; Marie Gebhardt; Dagmar Waltemath; Sabine Österle
Affiliations: SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics; Leiden University Medical Center; Radboud University Medical Center; Medical Informatics Laboratory; Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg; TMF; University Medicine Greifswald
Format: Short Spark – Main Day (26 March 2026)
This project explores the landscape of healthcare metadata catalogs across Europe by comparing their underlying schemas. Participants will analyze similarities and differences among national implementations of DCAT-AP and HealthDCAT-AP, identifying both standardized areas and opportunities for improvement.
The work responds to challenges in discoverability and interoperability of healthcare datasets caused by divergent metadata standards and national adaptations. By collecting and examining schemas from multiple European initiatives, participants will map structural differences, overlapping concepts, and missing terms using established comparison frameworks and mapping tools.
Expected outputs include a comparative overview of healthcare metadata schemas, visual maps, gap analyses, and concrete recommendations for harmonization, potentially including a minimal convergent metadata schema. All results will be made openly accessible and collated for publication following the hackathon.
OpenMRS as a Living Lab: Linking EHRs to the Semantic Web for Personalized Medicine
Proposers: Claude Nanjo; Stephanie Medlock; Ronald Cornet; Andra Waagmeester
Affiliation: Amsterdam UMC
Format: Long-Term Project (Continuing Beyond the BioHackathon)
This project proposes the use of the open-source OpenMRS electronic health record platform as a living laboratory for demonstrating integration with Semantic Web knowledge sources. The goal is to prototype APIs and workflows that enrich clinical data with linked biomedical and genomic knowledge, providing practical and reproducible patterns for decision support and medical informatics education.
Recognizing the limitations of commercial and legacy EHR systems for experimentation, the project emphasizes open standards, privacy-preserving approaches, and reproducible deployment using synthetic patient data. Participants will model genotype–phenotype relationships, connect to external knowledge bases via APIs and federated queries, and experiment with embedding decision support into clinical workflows.
Rather than delivering a full production system, expected outcomes include shared insights, prototype experiments, architectural sketches, example modules, and documented lessons learned that can inform future research, teaching, and production-level implementations.
Bring Your Concepts: Creating Reusable Meaning Mappings for Health Data Interoperability
Proposers: Pedro Paulo F. Barcelos¹; Niek van Ulzen¹; Reinier Groeneveld¹; Ana Konrad¹; Qasim Khalid²; Shuxin Zhang³; Annemarie Trompert¹; Janet Vos¹
¹ Health-RI, Jaarbeursplein 6, 3521 AL, Utrecht, The Netherlands
² Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), Albinusdreef 2, 2333 ZA Leiden, The Netherlands
³ Amsterdam University Medical Center, Meibergdreef 9, 1105 AZ, Amsterdam Zuidoost, The Netherlands
Format: Short Spark – Main Day (26 March 2026)
This hands-on “mapping clinic” invites participants to bring concepts from their ontologies, vocabularies, schemas, or implemented standards and align them to a shared semantic hub. Instead of maintaining many pairwise mappings, each concept will receive a single reusable mapping, making semantic intent explicit and reducing the risk of “false agreement.”
The clinic operationalizes the Health-RI Semantic Interoperability Initiative framework, using the Health-RI Ontology (HRIO) as a hub and the Health-RI Mapping Vocabulary (HRIV) to formalize mapping relations. Sessions will include intake, mapping, peer review, and packaging of reusable mapping sets.
Participants ranging from ontology engineers and data stewards to researchers and newcomers are welcome. Outputs will include reusable, well-documented mapping sets and practical learning outcomes in meaning-centric alignment workflows, documentation of ontological commitments, and improved judgment in interoperability decision-making.
Microscopy Metadata Meets Semantic Web
Proposer: Tiago Lubiana
Affiliation: German BioImaging
Format: Long-Term Project (Continuing Beyond the BioHackathon)
This project focuses on the intersection between Semantic Web technologies and the microscopy ecosystem, including the OMERO platform, the OME-NGFF standard, and bioimaging repositories. The session is designed as an open collaboration space where participants can work on Ontop virtual knowledge graphs, RO-Crate/JSON-LD integrations, and Linked Data representations of the OME Model.
Microscopy data is highly heterogeneous and managed through diverse tools and workflows, making robust research data management increasingly essential. With growing momentum around FAIR tooling in the bioimaging domain, the expertise of the Semantic Web community can play a pivotal role in strengthening interoperability and sustainability of imaging infrastructures. Several ongoing community projects, including efforts initiated in previous hackathons, are ready for further development and refinement.
Participants are invited to contribute to repositories and open issues in this space or to pursue related ideas aligned with their interests. Possible activities include building visual query interfaces for SPARQL endpoints, extending ontology resources such as the Biological Imaging Methods Ontology, or experimenting with linked data approaches for imaging metadata. Any level of expertise is welcome, and no special resources are required beyond a laptop and curiosity.
The expected outcome is incremental yet meaningful progress in microscopy research infrastructure, shared prototypes, improved tooling, and strengthened community collaboration across the semantic web and bioimaging domains.