Towards interoperable bioscience data

30 Jan 2012

Data interoperabliity

Fifty researchers representing 37 research groups from all over the world plead in Nature Genetics to use the ISA standard in order create data interoperability. Chris Evelo, group leader BiGCaT Maastricht University and NBIC Faculty, is one of the authors.

Shared, annotated research data and methods offer new discovery opportunities and prevent unnecessary repetition of work. Although funding agencies, journals and community initiatives encourage good data stewardship and sharing through the use of community reporting standards, data sharing remains challenging.

To make full use of research data, the bioscience community needs to adopt technologies and reward mechanisms that support interoperability and promote the growth of an open 'data commoning' culture. The Nature Genetics paper describes the prerequisites for data commoning and presents an established and growing ecosystem of solutions using the shared 'Investigation-Study-Assay' (ISA) framework to support that vision.

Chris Evelo explains: “ISA introduces new ways of analysing the enormous amounts of bioscience data. For instance: the possibility to compare all diabetes studies which describe diet changes”.

Nature Genetics 44, 121–126 (2012) doi:10.1038/ng.1054
http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v44/n2/full/ng.1054.html

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