Seven Past Nine GmbH (7P9-DE) is a micro-company dedicated to advancing data stewardship across collaborative scientific research projects and, as the name suggests, a sister company of the Slovenian Seven Past Nine d.o.o. (7P9-SI). The driving force behind the company’s vision for harmonised data management is Thomas Exner, the founder of 7P9-DE. His quest is to make data accessible first to all project partners and then publicly whenever possible, and his never-ending battle is to transform how data is recorded and managed through scientific research projects.
With his background in chemistry and drug design, his domain knowledge complements 7P9-SI’s expertise in software development and user experience design, creating a knowledge infrastructure, used e.g. for the MACRAMÉ Information Hub, that strives to make research outputs from material and life sciences transparent, interoperable, and reusable from the outset. Together with partners from the NanoCommons project, they pioneered the concept of “data shepherding”, a concept that elevates FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable) data management practices into a central building block of any scientific progress granting that all project outputs (protocols, computational models, validation data, test results) are effectively captured, structured, and made accessible.
Data collection and structuring centres on embedding study design maps (previously known as instance maps) into the earliest phases of project planning. These maps are not only a visual representation of the research process but also allow partners to comprehensively organise and store data from all workflows, preparing them for aggregation and reuse across research projects and regulatory frameworks. Based on recent feature improvements of the study design tools, multiple partners working on these maps can now co-create workflows, edit and coordinate data sharing within specific use cases, which can solve incoherence and identify data gaps across the project, boosting interoperability and the clarity of material, sample, and data provenance.
7P9-DE’s Role within the MACRAMÉ Project
Together with 7P9-SI, 7P9-DE leads the design and implementation of the centralised management of all MACRAMÉ research outcomes. As mentioned above, the centre for this effort lies in the MACRAMÉ Information Hub, a knowledge management environment designed to capture, interlink, and structure the documentation of the progress in the MACRAMÉ Use-Cases from production of the advanced materials, embedding into complex products and biological matrices up to safety and sustainability assessment along large parts of the material life cycles. The Hub serves as a network to connect protocols, standard operating procedures, materials, safety data sheets, and diverse metadata with experimental results, creating an accessible knowledge base.
This is achieved without forcing partners to follow pre-formatted data templates. Pressuring partners to use a format not native to their internal processes often leads to delays in data sharing and leads to situations where important information cannot be provided since it doesn’t fit into the structure enforced by the template. Instead, partners in MACRAMÉ provide their data in the organisation-specific format(s), and these are then further processed by semi-automated workflows using 7P9’s Data Collector scripts, leading to harmonisation and FAIRness. This flexibility is essential in a project like MACRAMÉ, where partners work with tailored protocols, SOPs, IT environments, and often record data in a specific way. By establishing shared and curated metadata, the data shepherd ensures that heterogeneous data can be connected within a common structure and is fit for long-term storage and public sharing.
Being able to use time, which was previously needed for manual data transformation, to import the documentation quality and completeness of (meta)data and corresponding method descriptions and protocols as well as the easiness to find information on specific life cycle stages and experiments performed on these were presented at multiple conferences including two Harmonisation & Standardisation workshops organised by jointly by MACRAMÉ and its sister projects. The interest expressed by many stakeholders as well as proposing the study-design-map-based documentation of life cycle stages during the feedback period to the EU Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design (SSbD) Framework led to additional invitation to present the approach at the 5th SSbD Stakeholder Workshop organised by the EU (5-6 December 2024) and the Joint Regulatory Risk Assessors Summit – Advancing Safety & Sustainability Assessments of Advanced Materials (19-20 June 2024), and its integration into 2 Informed Recommendation prepared by MACRAMÉ.
Experience and Future Goals
The MACRAMÉ Project has provided 7P9-DE with valuable experience and opportunities to test and refine its approach to data shepherding. 7P9-DE’s mission remains to guide data providers through the vast and intricate landscape of modern data infrastructures, helping users to recognize the benefits of structured documentation and curated metadata collection with provenance trails, ultimately improving their own workflows and efficiency.
While this project has highlighted the ongoing challenges of harmonisation across diverse systems, it has also proved that collaboration and data accessibility are essential for progress and represent best practice in modern science. Working towards the goal to transform project culture by empowering partners to view data management as a collaborative tool, rather than a burden, 7P9-DE aims to foster transparency, shape standards for data-driven research practices, and lay the foundation for a reusable and interoperable future research. It is essential that methods and datasets curated within the MACRAMÉ Project can serve as benchmarks beyond the project itself, with the prospect that they can be used to further develop roadmaps in regulatory validation and standardisation, with the ultimate goal of providing support for decision-making processes in safety assessment and validation. This is already happening, as can be seen by the uptake of 7P9’s approaches and tools in projects like CHIAMSA and PINK, and is considered in current applications for new funding. Finally, 7P9-DE seeks to advance interoperability on a larger scale, linking project-level knowledge hubs such as the MACRAMÉ Information Hub with broader European and international infrastructures to ensure long-term sustainability and accessibility, in accordance with the FAIR Principles. For this, important collaborations with and active participation in important initiatives like IAM-I, the NSC, the EMMC, and IRISS are pursued. But this is another story.
