BioData Interest group
The BioData Interest Group brings together the NFDI consortia DataPLANT, NFDI4Microbiota, NFDI4Biodiversity, FAIRagro, NFDI4Objects, and NFDI4BIOIMAGE to strengthen research data management across the biological sciences. Although the consortia serve diverse research communities ranging from plant science and microbiology to biodiversity research, agrosystem science, material heritage, and bioimaging, they share common methodological needs and work with overlapping biological data types.
Building on complementary expertise and investments, the BioData Interest Group aims to harmonise research data management strategies, improve access to services, and foster cross-consortia synergies. Key areas of collaboration include joint training and outreach, coordinated user support, co-development and reuse of services, shared infrastructure initiatives, and collaborative policy engagement. Through this structured cooperation, the group seeks to advance FAIR and open data practices, support researchers more effectively, and promote sustainable, interoperable biodata infrastructures within the NFDI landscape and beyond.
DataPLANT is a consortium for the plant science community, providing a state-of-the-art tool-box for managing, processing and publishing data packages early on in the research process following an open contribution and participatory model. Its overarching goal is to provide robust, easily accessible and user-oriented research data management practices, tools, and infrastructure to support collaborative plant biology research.
NFDI4Microbiota offers a broad set of solutions and services to the microbiological research community to make their data and other research output FAIR and open. This includes among others training, data storage solutions, data analysis services and RDM consulting.
NFDI4Biodiversity is a broad resource provider and expert network with a variety of services for biodiversity, ecological and environmental data. The consortium develops a common infrastructure and has intensive efforts in data mobilisation according to the FAIR principles, with focus on occurrence and molecular sequencing data (metabarcoding), as well as enabling the different method and data oriented subcommunities.
FAIRagro is developing a research data infrastructure for agrosystem sciences. Quality-assured and legally compliant datasets are connected and made discoverable, reusable and machine-actionable in accordance with FAIR principles. Support for data analysis and research data management is provided through a coordinated network of trainers, data stewards, and a central helpdesk.
NFDI4Objects develops solutions for research data management related to the material heritage of approximately three million years of human and environmental history. The consortium is aimed at individuals of all experience and career levels who wish to collaboratively shape the digital transformation of research data infrastructure within the involved disciplines in a sustainable manner.
Image data is central to biological research because it captures spatial, temporal, and functional relationships in high resolution, e.g., in disease research. NFDI4BIOIMAGE develops new formats, metadata standards, analysis methods, and processing environments for optimal use, e.g., in AI-supported pattern recognition.
Collaborations:
Progress on the interoperability between ARC (annotated research context) and the image data management system OMERO
ARC is an ISA-based metadata standard developed in the plant sciences community by the consortium DataPLANT. For image data, we work collaboratively on the interoperability between ARC and the well-established image data management system OME Remote Objects (OMERO). To this end, two hackathons took place , resulting in a first extended documentation on advancing OMERO and ARC interoperability. Find these interim results published on Zenodo!