Peter McQuilton
@drosophilic/@biosharing
The BioSharing portal - linking databases, data
standards and policies in the life, biomedical and
environmental sciences
RDA 9th Plenary, IGAD meeting, 5-7 April 2017, Barcelona, Spain

• A web-based, curated and searchable portal that monitors the
development and evolution of standards, their use in
databases and the adoption of both in data policies,
to inform and educate

Complex and evolving landscape
Data policies by
funders, journals and
other organizations
Databases, tools
and services
Content standards
Formats Terminologies Guidelines
Models/Formats = Conceptual
model, conceptual schema,
exchange formats
Terminologies = Controlled
vocabularies, taxonomies,
thesauri, ontologies etc.
Guidelines = Minimum information
reporting requirements, checklists

Content standards
Data policies by
funders, journals and
other organizations
Databases, tools
and services
Formats Terminologies Guidelines
By grass-roots
groups, e.g.:
By standard
organizations, e.g.:
Complex and evolving landscape

Helping users
make the right
decision
My funder’s data policy recommends the use of established
standards, but which are widely endorsed and applicable to
my crop data?
We need a standard for sharing farm
data, what’s out there and who
should we talk to?
I have some old rice genomic data in
format X, which is now deprecated;
what format has replaced X?
What databases are heavily supported
in the community that we should
recommend to our authors?

Indicators to describe the status of
standards and databases
Ready for use, implementation, or recommendation
In development
Status uncertain
Deprecated as subsumed or superseded
Manually curated and verified
by the community behind each
resource

Track evolution

Track evolution

Data Policy
List of their
recommended
databases and standards
Visualizing the relationships between
data…

Data Policy
…to inform and educate on existing and
new resources

Standard developing groups, incl.:Journals/publishers, incl.:
BioTools
Cross-links and data exchange, incl.:
Societies and organisations, incl.: Institutional RDM services, incl.:
Projects/programmes,
incl.:
Working with the community/adopters
WG
output
available
now

Acknowledgements