COPO: A Data Stewardship Platform for Plant Scientists

We present Collaborative Open Plant Omics (COPO), a brokering service between plant scientists and public repositories, which enables management, aggregation and publication of research outputs described and integrated using linked data. COPO provides consolidated access to services and disparate information sources via a web interface and Application Programming Interfaces.

Users create profiles which represent a logical span of research, such as a grant funding round or PhD project. ‘Research objects’ comprising a broad spectrum of potential outputs (such as sequence data, images, manuscripts, source code, posters) can be uploaded into the profile. Annotation of these objects with community-supported standards is facilitated using simple user-interface wizards which aim to reduce the complexity of this task, supported by ISA components (http://isa-tools.org/) for metadata interoperability and automated metadata format conversion. COPO uses the Ontology Lookup Service (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ols) to provide the crucial contextual metadata required for standardised data description. Currently, deposition of both data and metadata to the European Nucleotide Archive for sequence data, and Figshare for data types such as images, posters, and presentations is supported.

In the future, we will support more public repositories for multi-omic data submission, and users will be able to search for and pull such data into analysis environments such as CyVerse and Galaxy. We will subsequently track the outputs and associated metadata in COPO, thus creating a provenance trail from data to publication.

http://copo-project.org/

https://github.com/collaborative-open-plant-omics/COPO