This document provides information about a meeting to design an integrated information system called MARS (Microbial Antarctic Resource System) for microbial biodiversity data from Antarctica. The goals are to capture stakeholder needs, scope the project, identify requirements, examine challenges of unifying different data types, and provide recommendations. Participants will discuss priorities and needs, examine sample data, and have hands-on activities over multiple days to iteratively design MARS.

1. Welcome to MARS
Microbial Antarctic Resource System

2. Welcome to MARS
Microbial Antarctic Resource System

3. Logistics
• WiFi login/pass
• Coffee
• Food
• Toilets

4. Why are we here?
• ANTABIF: Antarctic Biodiversity Information
Facility
• IPY: International Polar Year
• CAML: Census of Antarctic Marine Life
• CCAMBIO: Climate Change and Antarctic
Microbial Biodiversity
• Try to design an integrated information system
for Antarctic microbes

5. Proposed approach
• 1st day to capture needs and ideas
• Interactive
• Speakup
• Hands-on
• Virtual participants
• Interdisciplinary

6. Challenges
• Different levels of data processing on different data sets
• Different regions of the same gene (16S rRNA or 18S
rRNA) that are not comparable or alignable vs. nearly
full length gene sequences generated in the past.
• Different levels of sequencing effort
• Different sequencing technologies
• Providing raw/semi processed data AND the processed
data that publications are built on.
• Can consider how ICoMM dealt with this for short-read
pyrosequencing data; there are ~ 20 Southern Ocean
data sets there in FASTA format and processed format

7. Challenge
To unify data from different biodiversity domains

8. Expected outcomes
• scope MARS
• identify prioritized requirements for MARS
• reality check: identification of technology
and standards
• identification of stakeholders
• recommendations (white paper)
• organize SCAR OSC meeting

9. Today
• Intro presentations
• Discussions
• Examination of actual data
• Identification of your needs
• Identification of your priorities
• (broad) scoping and requirements for MARS

10. Rest of the week
• Open
• Focused groups, hands-on
• Agile, iterative workflow
• Input always welcome
• Communication @biodiversityaq