Community based standards, a BD2K request for comments

One of the Big Data to Knowledge, BD2K, activities has been to hold workshops to assess the state of the bioinformatics resource landscape and one important feature is the community standard, something NIF has been very concerned about for the last 8 years. We know that there are thousands of scientific databases in the public space, but how many are used by the community and how many are even consistently maintained is a difficult question to answer.

 

What is a community standard?

Many communities of scientists, especially those who share some aspects of their data, have developed sets of information that they routinely capture about the experiments they run. For example, all scientists would capture the species which their experiments were performed on, though sometimes this may be quite difficult if one is working with mouse genes in a humanized e.coli cell line.

 

Why do they want to know about your community standards?

The BD2K grants have come into a complex landscape of existing community resources, supported resources, and unsupported or abandoned resources. The question as to which resources should be adopted broadly and which can be scrapped is a very important question, but can't be answered without community feedback.

 

How can I comment? Click here to see draft report and comment


The bottom of the workshop report has a comment section. These comments are necessary to get a broader picture of the landscape. Please add your two cents to this, especially if you run a repository or other data resource. NIH and the BD2K project leaders need to hear from you, before January 20th!