Pascale Gaudet President, ISB Executive Board

Nature Precedings : doi:10.1038/npre.2010.5134.1 : Posted 26 Oct 2010

Pascale Gaudet

President, ISB Executive Board


Biocuration is achieved through the combined efforts of the research community, software and database developers, and biocurators. Experimental research community generate data

New research hypotheses

Biocurators, software and database developers organize the data and make the data available for all to use


From knowledge to problem solving • How can we prevent or cure diseases? • How can we achieve sustainable energy supply ? • How can we ensure safe and sufficient food and water supply?


The challenge • Modern research generates huge quantities of data • Publications are not easily amenable to computational analyses • Biology is difficult to model: - modular, contextual and adaptative - biological data is highly heterogeneous


What’s out there ? Database Collection 2010 (NAR): 1230 databases • Data repositories • Curated resources • Data integration knowledgebases • Many areas: proteins, protein structures, genes, genomes, protein-protein interactions, pathways, etc …


The real challenge… Researchers expect databases to be available, current, accurate, stable, user-friendly, comprehensive, free Funding for Data Management resources

Research Funding


Common goals of the Biocuration community • Providing compatible infrastructures for data deposition, data exchange and analysis: - Common controlled vocabularies - Compatible tools, IDs, data formats • Balancing stability and innovation • Getting researchers involved • Ensuring sustainability


• Incorporated in 2009 • Currently 300 members • 150 groups and institutions


Executive board 2010-2011

Terri Attwood Alex Bateman U. Manchester, UK Sanger, UK

Claire O’Donavan EBI, UK

Tanya Berardini Carnegie, USA

Lorna Richardson MRC, UK

Mike Cherry Stanford, USA

Tadashi Imanishi AIST, Japan

Pascale Gaudet SIB, Switzerland

Ioannis Xenarios SIB, Switzerland


Special thanks

Lydie Bougueleret SIB, Switzerland Founding member Treasurer

Owen White University of Maryland, USA


ISB mission • Define and promote the work of biocurators

• Foster connections with user communities to ensure that databases and accompanying tools meet specific user needs • Promote communication and exchanges between curators: meetings, workshops, discussion forums, evaluation of resources, shared documentation on standards and annotation procedures


Ongoing projects • Publicize the existence and goals of the ISB • Connect with journals, and publishers

• Conference organization • BioDBCore: Guidelines for Biological databases


• Working group includes a growing list of scientists from NAR database and DATABASE, MIBBI, Elixir, MODs, CASIMIR, etc • Goal is to provide Core Standards for Biological Databases defined by the community • To be announced in 2011 in an editorial


Proposed Core Descriptors • • • • • • • •

Information stored/annotated Data release frequency Data formats Data submission policy Formats accepted Versioning / access to historical files Manually curated data (yes/no) Controlled vocabularies used



ISB website


Publications


Get involved! biocurator.org • Become a member of the International Society for Biocuration • Join the email list • Participate in the discussion forum

• Attend the International BioCuration Conference • View and suggest jobs and conferences of interest • Questions, comments: [email protected]