Standards and Infrastructure for Diverse, Dispersed Data

With next-generation sequencing, proteomic and metabolomic technologies, and greenhouse and field-based high-throughput phenotyping all increasingly common, a growing diversity of biological data is becoming available for plant species.  While some of these data (e.g. nucleotide sequence data) are well-archived in international public repositories, other data types suffer from limited public availability, irregular data formatting and description, and dispersal over many resources.  In this talk I will describe a number of efforts for addressing these problems, developed in the context of the transPLANT and EXCELERATE projects.  These include the development of MIAPPE, a set of minimal information standards for plant phenotyping experiments; the development of a distributed approach for the integrated querying of dispersed, diverse data; a new framework for discovery and retrieval of plant phenotypic data; and a wider vision for how different resources (with particular specialities) might combine to present users with a single virtual resource. Although some of the challenges faced by the plant science community are specific, others are shared with other biological researchers, and I will conclude by showing how these initiatives fit within the broader context of the ELIXIR life science data infrastructure.