DMMCore: Data and Model Management Core for ERASysAPP & Europe

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This project, in partnership with colleagues in HITS, Heidelberg and Sybit, Switzerland, aims at establishing an internationally sustained Data and Model Management service to the European Systems Biology community. Many projects in Systems Biology have been funded worldwide. However, it is often not clear how the results are made available to further research. Some result data sets or models are stored in public resources, but not all. Other repositories are ripe for a greater exploitation world-wide. Funding agencies now expect new projects to publish their results using open access and to provide a data management and data sustainability plan to assure that their investment has the desired impact. However, the researchers often have neither the means nor the knowledge necessary to publish and maintain their results according to the necessary standards so that they remain available beyond the end of their project. The results as requested by the publishers are often insufficient to be able to reliably reproduce results. Models and standard operating procedures are often not available or are not sufficiently described to be reproducible. This introduces inefficiencies, as the limited reusability and impact of project results on future projects leads to reinventions of methods and tools and slows the pace of scientific progress. Systems Biology projects often have large and heterogeneous data sets, always have mathematical models based on experimental data. Such projects usually have researchers from various disciplines at many locations collaborating, where direct communication is often difficult not just because of the locality but also due to different semantics among disciplines. A shared software interface with transparent data and links to models is essential to allow for interdisciplinary research and to interact among research groups in Systems Biology. The iterative cycle between experiment and models that is typical in System Biology projects, mandates a good versioning system for experiment and model versions as well as investigation-study organisational structures such that the project workflow is clear and reproducible. Furthermore, a strict adherence to community standards and standard operating procedures is important for linking data and models created by different project members. A management platform needs to support experimental workflows and model and data linkages, with good tools for data and model annotation and adherence to standard formats of representation. In order to have all the information for a reproducible scientific process, data for model construction and model validation need to be clearly separated and all data, models and Standard Operating Procedures must be made available for download. Dedicated software platforms and tools are necessary to lift scientific research in Systems Biology up to industrial standards of reproducibility and quality control. In this project we will establish a sustainable European data and model e-infrastructure for the European systems biology community with a long-term business model. We will found a European wide Data & Model Management Network to support and promote data and model management and capacity building, using the EraSysAPP ERANet as a seed. We will disseminate knowledge and standards, coordinating with related e-infrastructures such as ELIXIR and ISBE, and interacting with community related policy and standards settings. We will develop the necessary toolset and set up a data and model management platform for Systems Biology projects by combining and further developing/improving the well-proven software platforms SEEK and openBIS with a pool of public tools and resources, working closely with both the user and the developer communities. Finally, we will establish a sustainable training programming on the use and development of the platform and on data/model management practices for Systems Biology.