TeSS: a federated, FAIR-aligned platform for distributed management and exchange of training resources

Presentation from the eScience Lab (The University of Manchester) at the ISMB/ECCB 2025 conference (view all).

TeSS is presented in the Education track as a poster and video: D-037, Thursday 24 July, 10:00-11:20 and 13:00-14:00 (viewable Wed and Thu).

TeSS: A federated, FAIR-aligned platform for distributed management and exchange of training resources

• Project Website: https://tess.elixir-europe.org/about 
• Source Code: https://github.com/ElixirTeSS/TeSS 
• License: BSD 3-Clause License
  

Main Text of Abstract

Training materials and events are widely dispersed and fragmented, making it challenging for users to identify relevant materials. Training e-Support System (TeSS) is a web-based open-source platform consolidating life science resources from various providers into an easy-to-use portal. It is a one-stop-shop for trainers and trainees to discover training materials, workshops, and online courses for bioinformatics, data science, and computational biology.

For providers, TeSS makes it easy to make resources FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). Utilising automated scrapers and open standards (Bioschemas, EDAM), materials are automatically discovered and registered from existing websites. Conversely, TeSS content can be easily embedded in other websites using HTML widgets or its JSON API.

TeSS is a flagship training resource of ELIXIR, the largest European life sciences infrastructure, populated by 122 providers across 24 countries. The platform has  been adopted by organisations outside ELIXIR, forming the basis of  independent instances including PaNOSC Photon Neutron training, Digital Research Skills Australasia, Open Science Netherlands, Digital Research Alliance Canada and SciLifeLab. However, these instances operate independently, preventing any kind of sharing.

To address this fragmentation of resources, we’re developing the platform through the mTeSS-X project. mTeSS-X introduces the concept of “spaces”, where different scientific domains have their own self-managed catalogue within a “hub” instance. The project will allow sharing of nominated content between spaces via an exchange protocol to benefit the wider community. In the presentation we will highlight the TeSS salient features and how it facilitates training to be made FAIR.