Plans for the Arabidopsis Information Portal

With the funding for TAIR coming to an end, the Arabidopsis community organized a series of workshops and discussions to plan for the future of Arabidopsis informatics. The outcome was a vision for the Arabidopsis Information Portal that will serve as a mechanism to bring together the ever-increasing amounts of Arabidopsis data into a single, user-friendly location using the latest web technologies and web services. It will adopt a modular, federated development model which ensures that responsibility for generation and maintenance of valuable data to remains in the hands of the individual data providers and spreads the burden of supporting such resources across a potentially wider range of funding agencies and countries. Some key elements are:

1. The development of modular, community-extensible web-based interface that will include user work spaces that can be configured with data retrieval, analysis, and visualization applications.

2. Implementation of an Arabidopsis-specific instance of InterMine to facilitate seamless integration of data and ready access via web services.

3. Assimilation of diverse and rich data sources from community providers into the AIP via InterMine.

4. Design and construction of a web services layer that facilitates data access, integration with iPlant Collaborative resources, federation with other data providers, and development of analytical workflows.

5. Transfer of the Col-0 “gold standard” annotation into an open-source relational schema and creation of community annotation resource for Arabidopsis.

6. Pro-active interaction with community providers of modules providing transcriptomics, epigenomic, proteomic, metabolomic, comparative genomic and other omic data sets to assimilate their data.