ELIXIR talk – session: ELIXIR National collaborations, international standards.
Abstract
We introduce BioSharing (http://www.biosharing.org), a curated, web-based, searchable portal of content standards, databases, and data policies in the life sciences, broadly encompassing the biological, environmental and biomedical sciences. As of today, BioSharing has 1,387 records of which 629 are community-developed standards (terminologies, formats and models, and reporting guidelines), 734 are databases and 25 are data policies. BioSharing maps the dynamic landscape of data standards, monitoring their: development, evolution and integration; implementation and use in databases; and adoption in data policies by funders and journals. Our curation and interlinking of the records within and across the three registries, combined with our advanced and wizard search functionalities, assist researchers, developers, curators, funders, journals, data managers and librarians to best navigate through and select their standards of interest, to understand the maturity of each standard, to find the databases that implement them, or to make an informed decision on which content standards or database should be recommended in a policy. BioSharing is part of the contribution from the ELIXIR UK Node to the EXCELERATE Interoperability Platform, and is under review as a potential ELIXIR Standards Catalogue. BioSharing fills a glaring gap in the current ELIXIR registries provision; contributing towards the ELIXIR mission, specifically the strategy around the coordination of standards – their development, maintenance and evolution, to avoid duplications, fill gaps and overcome fragmentations. BioSharing is also a pivotal resource for the implementation of the ELIXIR-supported FAIR principles, defining the characteristics that contemporary data resources, tools and infrastructures should exhibit, to be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable by third-parties. As described in the FAIR paper, BioSharing ensures that standards themselves are FAIR and helps users to discover those that are relevant to their data (Wilkinson et al, Scientific Data, 2016; doi:10.1038/sdata.2016.18). BioSharing harnesses community curation to collate and cross-reference resources across the life sciences from around the world. Every record is designed to be interlinked, providing a detailed description not only on the resource itself, but also on its relations with other life science infrastructure. Serving a variety of stakeholders, BioSharing cultivates a growing community, to which it offers diverse benefits. It is a resource for funding bodies and journal publishers to navigate the metadata landscape of the biological sciences; an educational resource for librarians and information advisors; a publicising platform for standard and database developers/curators; and a research tool for bench and computer scientists to plan their work. BioSharing is working with an increasing number of journals and other registries, for example linking standards and databases to training material and tools. BioSharing content can be searched using simple or advanced searches, filtered via a filtering matrix, or grouped via the ‘Collection’ feature. Novice users can access our askBioSharing wizard, which guides users to the information they need in a step-by-step manner. A number of our Collections have been hand-picked by experts in their fields, or organisations such as journal publishers or funding bodies. These Collections are considered Recommendations and every record in these collections is given a ‘recommended’ badge. Examples include the NPG Scientific Data and BioMedCentral Recommendations, that collate and link the recommended standards and repositories from their author data policies. Other publishers, projects and organizations are also creating Collections by selecting and filtering standards and databases relevant to their work, such as the BD2K bioCADDIE project. As a community effort, BioSharing offers users the ability to ‘claim and maintain’ records, allowing their editing and update. This ensures BioSharing records are accurate and current. Each maintainer also has a user profile that can be linked to their resources, publications and ORCID ID, thus providing visibility for them as an individual. BioSharing is a rapidly growing database with an active user community and is closely embedded in and co-sponsored by several infrastructure programmes, e.g. the ELIXIR UK Node and the NIH Big Data to Knowledge Initiative’s metadata and data discovery centers. Launched in 2011 and built by the same core team extending on the successful MIBBI portal (2008-2010), BioSharing is run an Operational Team (based in Oxford and part of the ELIXIR-UK Node) and driven by an international Advisory Board, including representative from ELIXIR, major publishers, resource providers, researchers, library science experts and informatics professionals. BioSharing usage has grown by over 40% in the last year and half, thanks to successful user and stakeholder engagement via a joint BioSharing Working Group jointly (operating under the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and Force11) and increasing global awareness of BioSharing. In this presentation we will describe the three registries, the collection/recommendation feature, and the many ways in which BioSharing can be searched using our advanced search and step-by-step wizard tool.
Authors
Peter Mcquilton, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Massimiliano Izzo, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Allyson Lister, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Eamonn Maguire, Antarctic Design, United Kingdom
Philippe Rocca-Serra, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Milo Thurston, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Susanna-Assunta Sansone University of Oxford, United Kingdom