Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
industry. This issue is exacerbated by the absence of agreed standards
that unambiguously identify the entities, processes and observations
within experimental results.
Empowering Industrial Research With Shared Biomedical
Vocabularies,
Drug Discovery Today
(2011)
7.1 The growing need for content curation
in industry
High-quality public bioscience research data should be readily available
for re-use in private sector research and development. At present, public
resources, diverse in implementation, provide data whose formatting and
annotation vary widely, requiring extensive manipulation to open their
content to integrative analyses. Such hindrances have motivated
community standardization initiatives to develop minimum information
checklists, terminologies and fi le formats, which are increasingly used in
the structuring, description, formatting and curation of data sets,
although in most cases only within the originating community. These
standards aim to ensure that descriptions of entities of interest (e.g. genes,
receptors) and related assays contain suffi cient contextual information
('experimental meta-data' - e.g. provenance of study materials, technology
and measurement types, sample-to-data relationships) to be
comprehensible and (in principle) reproducible; without such context,
data are of little value.
The process of utilizing shared, publicly available data using
community-sourced standards can still test the resolve of even the most
ardent advocate [1]. The focus of most community standardization
efforts on their own interests or technologies has led to development of
equivalent, yet (largely arbitrarily) different localized standards and
esoteric repositories, hindering data integration. Whether searching for
the scattered fi les from the various assays in a broadly based study, or
assembling the available data on a species or feature of interest,
fragmented data sets can only be re-assembled by those equipped to
navigate the various terminologies and formats used to represent and
annotate their parts (assuming their annotation is suffi cient even to
reliably identify them), impacting the ability of the R&D community to
utilize such data. And, of course, the dearth of accepted standards extends
to commercial knowledge providers, whose information also comes in
many forms, magnifying the challenge.
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