AgBioData: A Consortium of Agricultural Biological Databases

The future of agricultural research depends on data. Furthermore, it depends on how agricultural biological data is stored and shared. Governmental agencies, publishers and science funders now require data management plans for publicly funded experiments. This, along with the sheer volume of agricultural biological data being produced today makes good data management essential. AgBioData is a consortium of agricultural biological databases which strive to identify common goals relating to data set acquisition, display, user retrieval and manipulation; data, software and hardware standards, and database best practices. The objectives of AgBioData include: 1) coordinate with external groups such as CyVerse and scientific journals to develop standards for efficient data flow among data generators and databases, 2) encourage communication and sharing between databases. By encouraging communication between databases, together we can identify common problems and collaborate on solving them, 3) encourage sharing between databases to avoid duplication of work and support small research groups. Ultimately, we aim to work together to solve common issues to both leverage our work and to create database products that are more findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.