COpenPlantOmics (COPO): a Collaborative Bioinformatics Plant Science Platform

Accessibility to biological data has been hindered by lack of standards, lack of awareness of the benefits and pathways to releasing data that is described by those standards, and lack of services whereby data can be analysed, published and retrieved easily. Recently, there has been a large commitment by the BBSRC to push for open access data and publishing to further bioscience research in the UK. However, barriers still exist that prevent scientists from openly depositing their data and metadata, which comprise a lack of interoperability between metadata annotation services, data repositories, data analysis platforms and data publishing platforms. As such, plant scientists might not: be aware that the services exist; have the expertise to use them; see the value in properly describing their data. This project aims to build COPO, the software infrastructure required to reach the level of interoperability that plant researchers need to describe their data using community-recognised ontologies, seamless bi-directional data flow to relevant repositories, and then publish these data for open access. COPO will manage the hardware infrastructure at TGAC to deliver a consistent robust staging area and database that will support unique accessioned artefacts representing the corpus of data and metadata a user wants to expose. The resulting marked-up datasets processed and published using COPO will allow greater potential integrative analysis using existing tools such as iPlant and Galaxy. New Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) will interconnect existing tools and services, and by developing new RESTful user interfaces that wrap up these APIs, COPO will be a single point-of-entry for plant researchers to disseminate their data all the way from generation to publication. By federating the TGAC iRODS data grid system with others, e.g. Texas Advanced Computing Center's iPlant installation, access to worldwide analytical infrastructure and data will be facilitated.