Omics Data Standards: synergy and implementations

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The marriage of conventional biomedical and environmental research with transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics technologies has created not only opportunities, but also new informatics challenges to biologists and bioinformaticians. We require new approaches to describe, store and exchange these - information intensive investigations, so that the datasets can be properly analyzed, compared and integrated. We need reporting standards agreed upon by a community for describing the way to report, for publication and dissemination, the results of a particular investigation and for making the research more accessible for the benefit of the wider scientific community. Data reporting standards, the basic pillar of data sharing, include: - Checklists, outlining the minimal requirements that should be reported - Syntax, defining the transmission formats that facilitate the exchange of the information - Semantics, adding the interpretive layer to the information. Given the high value of functional genomics and system biology information, standardization activities have moved from the fringes to centre-stage. Several grass roots, community-driven, international data standardization activities are underway to define standard reporting structure for one particular omics technologies (e.g. transcriptomics, proteomics). Discipline-specific initiatives, however, remain within each given discipline and as a consequence of this the overall standardization effort fragments, resulting in unnecessary duplication of effort, and the development of different semantics and syntaxes thereby limiting the potential for data exchange. Fortunately, there is a generally accepted view that concerted efforts are required throughout the functional genomics and reaching out to the system biology. Synergistic activities have begun already to remove redundancy and foster harmonisation and consolidation of reporting standards. By contrast, the sociological barriers can be quite challenging, mandating extensive liaison amongst communities. Also the time invested in these activities is often severely limited due to lack of resources. Face-to-face developers' workshops are critical to create consensus. Unfortunately it is very difficult to hold such workshops when no central fund exits to support the projects and when developers participate on a volunteer base, paying their own travel and accommodation expenses from wherever they can find the funds. In this proposal we are seeking funding to organize a series of hands-on workshops to ensure the coordinated development of data reporting standards. We propose to focus on the three thematic projects and with several environmental communities - both from the UK and around the globe - create the basis for developing data sharing environments, with the use cases from several biomedical and environmental communities.