Metadata and Data Sharing Committee report

The Functional Annotation of ANimal Genomes (FAANG) initative aims to create a comprehensive functional annotation for many animal genomes. A key requirement is to define strong metadata standards ensuring the data is well described and making the raw data maximally useful. It is also important that data can be rapidly shared both within FAANG and with the wider community.

The Metadata and Data Sharing Committee has three main goals:

1. Define metadata standards for samples, experiments and analyses.
2. Provide guidance for archival best practice.
3. Enable data sharing within FAANG and with the wider community.

Our metadata standards cover: samples, with information for both donor animals and biological material; experiments, with information on tissue/cell type derivation, sequence extraction and sequencing protocol; and analyses detailing alignment, quantification and signal processing protocols. These standards are versioned in a github repository.

All members of FAANG commit to following the Toronto Data Release Workshop guidelines¹; the Metadata and Data Sharing group are writing a data archiving strategy to help with this aim. This will provide guidance about the best assay archives to store different data types in, ensuring FAANG data is well represented in the assay archives hosted at EMBL-EBI and NCBI.

Finally the Metadata and Data sharing group will provide both within consortium data exchange and a public FTP site to ensure the data is rapidly and easily available to the whole community.

1. Toronto International Data Release Workshop Authors, Birney E, et al. Prepublication data sharing. Nature. 2009: 461:168-70.