AsianScientist (Jan. 30, 2012) – Lead by researchers at the University of Oxford, a group of more than 30 scientific organizations has produced a common standard that will make possible the consistent description of enormous and radically different databases compiled in fields ranging from genetics to stem cell studies.
This standard-compliant data sharing effort and the establishment of its online presence, the ISA Commons, is described in a commentary just published in the journal Nature Genetics.
“We are now working together to provide the means to manage enormous quantities of otherwise incompatible data, ranging from the biomedical to the environmental,” said Susanna-Assunta Sansone, Team Leader of the project at the Oxford e-Research Center.
Akin to a jigsaw puzzle, scientists can now fit the many pieces together to form a complete picture, Sansone explained.
Using this framework, small research groups can begin to store laboratory data that comply to community standards, without their own dedicated bioinformatic support.
And “it also has the potential to work for large centers too,” said Scott Edmunds, of the BGI Shenzhen, one of the groups contributing in this project.
Edmunds is also editor of GigaScience, a new combined database and journal focused on the publication and hosting of large scale-data from BGI and open-access publisher BioMedCentral. GigaScience is the first journal to offer authors the option to submit data in the ISA-Tab file format.
The Nature Genetics commentary can be found at: Sansone S-A et al. (2012) Toward interoperable bioscience data.
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Source: BGI Shenzhen.
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