OSCARS funded project FIESTA at EOSC Symposium 2025

The OSCARS funded project FIESTA has been selected to give a lightning talk at the EOSC Symposium 2025, to be held in Brussels, on 03-05 November 2025.

The talk is part of the "Lightning talks and demos" session taking place on November 4th, from 10:15 to 11:30 CET.

Abstract of the talk

"OSCARS FIESTA: FAIR Image Analysis across Science" 

Breaking Scientific Silos - The FIESTA OSCARS Mission: The OSCARS FIESTA project addresses a fundamental problem in scientific research: valuable image analysis methods remain siloed within disciplinary boundaries. Researchers in bioimaging, environmental sciences, and astrophysics (among others) often develop similar solutions independently, leading to duplicated efforts and missed opportunities for innovation. The challenge lies in understanding how existing semantic resources can bridge these domains to enable meaningful knowledge transfer.

Understanding Community Needs for Semantic Interoperability: FIESTA leverages EOSC infrastructure to map how different scientific communities describe their image analysis workflows and data. We're identifying how existing ontologies and controlled vocabularies can be extended or connected to enable cross-domain understanding. Through FAIR Implementation Profiles, we're documenting each community's current practices and semantic choices, revealing opportunities for reusing established vocabularies in new contexts.

Bidirectional Knowledge Flow: Our approach enables mutual benefits: image analysis experts can test their algorithms on diverse datasets from different domains to develop more robust methods, while domain specialists can easily discover and apply the most relevant analysis techniques with minimal technical overhead. This is achieved by understanding how each community currently describes their workflows and data, then identifying semantic bridges that make methods discoverable and interpretable across domains.

EOSC Implementation: We use Galaxy as workflow management system, WorkflowHub for sharing, and Research Object Crates to package workflows with semantic descriptions that span communities. Our Voronoi segmentation tutorial demonstrates this in practice - by understanding how bioimaging, astronomy, and environmental science communities describe similar analytical needs, we created documentation that makes the workflow accessible across all three domains.

From Images to Climate Knowledge: The methodology FIESTA develops for understanding community semantic needs and enabling cross-domain workflow discovery directly informs broader knowledge transfer challenges. FAIR2Adapt applies these same principles to climate adaptation, where practitioners must integrate insights from hydrology, urban planning, economics, and policy domains. By understanding how different adaptation communities describe their knowledge needs, FAIR2Adapt can identify existing semantic resources and vocabularies that enable cross-domain knowledge transfer.

Sustainable Knowledge Networks: Both projects demonstrate how understanding community practices and reusing existing semantic infrastructure create lasting value within EOSC. This approach builds knowledge networks that grow through community contributions while respecting existing practices and avoiding unnecessary standardisation overhead.