Update on the Rice Informatics Consortium: How to work together

Five goals were set by the Advisory Committee for the development of the International Rice Informatics Consortium for 2015: 1) develop a mechanism for unified germplasm tracking, 2) select subset(s) of germplasm for detailed studies and organize corresponding metadata using existing ontologies, 3) create a curated database of functional loci annotation, 4) establish communication with similar plant consortia (Arabidopsis, wheat, soy, etc), and 5) approach funding agencies. We will discuss our achievements and priorities for the coming year.  Additional members have joined, and we have established new collaborations. Several collaborative projects are being developed within IRIC where we are testing software development frameworks for making such collaborations efficient and sustainable.