Green Metadata prototype from eScience Lab & Physics wins CW25 Hack Day

Michael Sparks recently attended Collaborations Workshop 2025 (C25), University of Stirling, alongside a number of others from the eScience Lab team and Professor Caterina Doglioni from University of Manchester Physics & Astronomy.

The Collaborations Workshop, is organised annually by the Software Sustainability Institute. It brings together researchers, software developers, data scientists, and academics. This explores and develops best practices in research software, fostering collaborative projects. This includes a hack day on the final day, with teams assembled on the day.

It was a pleasant surprise that our hack on Green Metadata came first out of ten hacks from 10 teams.

In that short time, we created initial versions of the following:

• A literature review summarising relevant sustainability standards
• An initial green metadata schema definition (inspired by CFF)
• A browser-based Green Metadata metadata creation tool (using pyscript, example)
• A Django-based platform designed for longer-term use and potential data correlation across projects

The full list of team members / affiliations:

• Professor Caterina Doglioni. (University of Manchester, Physics, EVERSE)
• Michael Sparks (University of Manchester, Physics, EVERSE, eScience Lab)
• Loïc Lannelongue (University of Cambridge, Green Algorithms)
• Christina Bremer (University of Cambridge, Green Algorithms)
• Will Haese-Hill (University of Glasgow)
• Jyoti Bhogal (SSI Fellow, Research Software Alliance, WEHI)
• Duncan Leggat (UCL)

This page is a shortened version of a personal blog by Michael.