Updates on the FAANG M&DS Committee and the FAANG DCC at EMBL-EBI

The FAANG Data Coordination Centre (DCC) has been established at EMBL-EBI since November 1st 2016. The FAANG DCC will support members of the FAANG community in meeting the FAANG metadata and data sharing requirements and provide a data portal to facilitate the community in finding and using both FAANG generated data and the wider range of functional genomic data which can be found in the public archives.

The FAANG DCC works very closely with the Metadata and Data Sharing committee to ensure the standards FAANG members are expected to follow meet the downstream data use requirements of FAANG, but don’t present too high a burden to data generating teams. We have deployed a validation tool (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/vg/faang) which allows people to validate if they have met the standards for sample metadata. This is being extended to also work for experimental metadata and its rules.

Moving forward we are establishing a data portal to help the community explore the available data (http://data.faang.org). This portal will allow people to explore the samples and data collected by FAANG and other functional data found in the public archives for FAANG’s species of interest.

The FAANG Data Coordination Centre and the Metadata and Data Sharing committee want to help the community share and have access to high quality and well described data. Any questions about the best approach to this can be sent to faang-dcc@ebi.ac.uk. Members of the FAANG DCC team can be contacted at this address if you would like to meet and discuss your metadata and data sharing requirements during PAG.