Biodiversity Information Science and Standards :
Conference Abstract
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Corresponding author: Raïssa Meyer (raissa.meyer@awi.de)
Received: 31 Aug 2021 | Published: 01 Sep 2021
© 2021 Raïssa Meyer, Pier Buttigieg, John Wieczorek, Thomas Jeppesen, William Duncan, Yi-Ming Gan, Maxime Sweetlove, Saara Suominen, Task Group Sustainable Darwin Core MIxS Interoperability
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Meyer R, Buttigieg PL, Wieczorek J, Jeppesen TS, Duncan WD, Gan Y-M, Sweetlove M, Suominen S, Sustainable Darwin Core MIxS Interoperability TG (2021) Aligning Standards Communities: Sustainable Darwin Core MIxS Interoperability. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 5: e73775. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.5.73775
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Biodiversity is increasingly being assessed using omic technologies (e.g. metagenomics or metatranscriptomics); however, the metadata generated by omic investigations is not fully harmonised with that of the broader biodiversity community.
There are two major communities developing metadata standards specifications relevant to omic biodiversity data: TDWG, through its Darwin Core (DwC) standard, and the Genomic Standard Consortium (GSC), through its Minimum Information about any (x) Sequence (MIxS) checklists. To prevent these specifications leading to silos between the communities using them (e.g. INSDC: an internationally mandated database collaboration for nucleotide sequencing data [from health, biodiversity, microbiology, etc.] using the MIxS checklists; OBIS and GBIF: global biodiversity data networks using the DwC standard), there is a need to harmonise them at the level of the standards organisations themselves.
To this end, we have brought together representatives from these standardisation bodies, along with representatives from established biodiversity data infrastructures, domain experts, data generators, and publishers to develop sustainable interoperability between the two specifications. Together, we have:
To sustain these mechanisms of interoperability, we have proposed a Memorandum of Understanding between the GSC and TDWG. During our work, we also noted a number of key challenges that currently preclude interoperation between these two specifications.
In this talk, we will outline the major steps we took to get here, as well as the future activities we recommend based on our outputs.
metadata standards, omics, biodiversity, eDNA, semantics, data policy
Raïssa Meyer
TDWG 2021
We would like to thank all members of the TDWG/GBWG Sustainable DarwinCore MIxS Interoperability Task Group for their contributions to the work presented here.