Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Although several integration workfl ows are routinely run internally,
the person-hours cost of 'deciphering' the heterogeneous experimental
meta-data still remains signifi cant. Companies must invest signifi cant
effort to integrate public bioscience data with their own data; or outsource
such activity [2]. The mountain of technical frameworks needed to
achieve interoperability between community standards has also hindered
the development of general tools. The diversity of standards - and the
consequent lack of general tools - hinders discovery, because only a very
willing few can even discover, never mind integrate, information scattered
across several standalone resources.
7.2 The BioSharing initiative: cooperating
standards needed
Left unresolved, or separately and therefore ineffi ciently addressed by
individual companies, the lack of agreed standards will continue to limit
the utility of public data. The solution lies in an open collaborative
approach between the public and private sectors, lowering individual risk
and costs [3, 4]. To establish the lay of the standards landscape, and to
build graphs of relationships and complementarities in scope and
functionality, the BioSharing community catalogues available standards
[5], extending the work started with the Minimum Information for
Biological and Biomedical Investigations (MIBBI) portal [6]. These
standards often exhibit different levels of maturity and inevitably
duplication of effort. Lack of overall coordination also ensures that
signifi cant gaps in coverage remain. Although individual communities
cannot be corralled into collaboration, the BioSharing initiative is
intended to promote those that already exist, discouraging redundant if
unintentional competition. In time and after consultation, a set of criteria
for assessing the usability and popularity of the standards listed will be
implemented, along with links to tools that use them, or data resources
annotated with them.
If a common or at least complementary set of standards existed and
was widely used by the academic and commercial sectors, routine tasks
in the exploitation of both public and proprietary data such as text
mining, re-annotation and integration would be greatly facilitated [7].
There are also other benefi ts accruing to the development and acceptance
of general data and reporting standards. For example, by limiting the
range and variability of standards, the development and maintenance
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