Second MaterialVital-Digital (MVD) Workshop at IWM Freiburg
The Leibniz Institute for New Materials (INM), the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials (IWM), and the University of Freiburg met in Freiburg to discuss usecases, user stories and file sources.
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Outline
On 7–8 July 2026, members of the Freiburg Galaxy team (UFR), the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials (IWM), and the Leibniz Institute for New Materials (INM) met at IWM, Freiburg to discuss user journey, data journey and user stories. Additionally, the goal of the workshop was to explore how Galaxy could support data management, offer reproducible analysis, and computational workflows in the MVD project. The workshop focused on understanding the scientific use cases, mapping the journeys of researchers and their data, and identifying suitable integration points between Galaxy and existing platforms such as CKAN, RSpace, openBIS, and Fuseki.
User journeys and user stories
The MVD project includes nine materials-science use cases. The current focus is on electrospinning being led by INM, while additional topics include electroWriting, rheology, volumetric printing, functional polymers, H-NMR, cytotoxicity, laser cutting, and moulding.
Electrospinning experiments involve many interconnected parameters, including polymers, solvents, concentrations, bioagents, fabrication settings, operating windows, and final material properties. One example discussed during the workshop was the development of a living contact lens, combining material fabrication, biological components, and quality assessment.
A major outcome of the discussions was that the complete user journey and data journey must first be understood before deciding which computational steps should be implemented as Galaxy tools and workflows.
The MVD project aims to identify reusable computational workflows that can be applied to multiple materials-science use cases.
Metadata and terminology
The workshop highlighted the need to capture experimental parameters using established terminology and ontologies wherever possible.
A general metadata foundation based on Dublin Core was discussed, including properties such as:
dc:title
dc:creator
dc:subjectThis foundational layer could later be extended with domain-specific terms describing polymers, solvents, bioagents, fabrication processes, operating conditions, and quality measurements.
Rspace and CKAN as a central data portal
IWM plans to use CKAN as its primary data portal. A key integration discussed during the workshop was the addition of a Galaxy button in CKAN, allowing users to transfer selected datasets directly into Galaxy.
A few potential ideas for data exchange between CKAN and RSpace, as well as integrating CKAN with Fuseki to support structured metadata, ontologies, and semantic descriptions were discussed.
openBIS is already used at IWM and may also become an integration target. OMERO could support image and microscopy data within the wider infrastructure which is already available as a file source in Galaxy.
Exploring Galaxy for materials digitalisation at the MVD workshop
Several Galaxy features were explored during the workshop, including Galaxy history, datasets, tools, workflows, workflow invocations, and the Galaxy interactive tool. Ideas such as offloading compurationally intensive tasks to Galaxy, and using Galaxy for reproducible analysis and workflow management were discussed.
Connecting notebooks as tools
On 8 July, the INM team used the JupyterLab Interactive Tool in Galaxy and learned how to attach datasets directly from a Galaxy history. This enables researchers to work interactively while keeping input and output datasets connected to Galaxy’s history.
Potential roles for Galaxy
The exact computational role of Galaxy is still being defined. Potential areas include:
- Data annotation tools
- Reusable workflows for materials-science experiments and use cases
- FAIR data management and reproducible analysis
Next steps
The next steps are to:
- Create a functional CKAN-to-Galaxy integration
- Refine the electrospinning user and data journeys
- Identify relevant computational tasks for Galaxy
- Review existing materials-science ontologies
- Explore CKAN, RSpace, Fuseki, and openBIS integrations
The workshop provided an important first step for refining the approach to fullfill use cases and defining Galaxy’s significance within the MVD infrastructure. Galaxy will potentially complement MVD project by providing persistent storage, interactive environments, reusable tools, and computational workflows.