Dr Kathryn Hall1, Dr Jeff Christiansen2, Dr Nick dos Remedios4, Ms Sarah Richmond3, Dr Nigel Ward2, Mr Hamish Holewa4
1Atlas Of Living Australia, Dutton Park, Australia, 2Australian BioCommons, Brisbane, Australia, 3Bioplatforms Australia, Macquarie University, Australia, 4Atlas of Living Australia, Canberra, Australia
Approximately 30,000 researchers belong to the biosciences community in Australia; of these, 15,000 work in non-biomedical domains. Genomics (and genetics) underscore almost all sub-disciplines of life sciences, informing taxonomy, elucidating evolutionary histories, guiding conservation and environmental resilience, assuring biosecurity, and driving improvements in crops and livestock breeding. Life science researchers are significantly impeded in their efforts to comprehensively locate genomics data assets: while data are online, the repositories are largely disconnected, and so, data remain only partially findable.
The Australian Reference Genome Atlas (ARGA) project is developing FAIRer solutions for biosciences researchers by building an online platform for discovering and sharing genomics data. We showcase a prototype of our platform to demonstrate how ARGA will improve FAIRness in the following ways:
Findable: with a simple user interface, driven by Apache Solr, ARGA aggregates and indexes publicly available DNA-based repositories such as GenBank, the European Nucleotide Archive (EMBL-ENA), and Bioplatforms Australia data portal, and other smaller data repositories, using Darwin Core Archives (DwC-A).
Accessible: with cart functionality, ARGA will enable easier data downloading, through access pathways mediated by data providers.
Interoperable: ARGA processes data through Pipelines extensions developed by GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), and as used in Living Atlases (including Atlas of Living Australia), to harness and increase data interoperability for enhanced searching and data enrichment from other trait sources.
Reusable: data can be selected and exported to cloud-based analysis infrastructure, such as Galaxy Australia; DOIs for search results sets and formatted downloads for proprietary analyses packages increase reusability.
Biography:
Dr Kathryn Hall is the Product Champion for the Australian Reference Genome Atlas (ARGA). Kathryn is an invertebrate animal taxonomist, and has described species of marine sponges and flatworm parasites of fishes using an approach combining DNA data and morphological characteristics. Having worked in museums and universities for some years now, she brings to her work a respect for the importance of metadata and provenance for bringing trust and confidence to collections-based data.