Public and private partners get together at ODEX4all kick-off meeting

15 Apr 2015 - 2 min

On 15 April 2015 over 20 participants (private and public partners) of the Odex4all project met in Utrecht to convene about the scope of the project.

As Odex4all is set up as a public private partnership, with private partners contributing in cash or in kind to specific use cases, the meeting started with a discussion about the driving use cases of the project. Each private partner contributed its own specific use case, and synergistic as well as generic research questions were discerned. These research questions will form the backbone of the project.

Contentwise, it became clear that, although more than 50 datasets are already available to the ODEX4all consortium (based on earlier work of Open PHACTS, Bio2RDF, EURETOS, etc.), there is still a need for the addition of specific datasets. Especially from the microbial, plant and animal disciplines, but also specialised biomedical oriented ones. Since much of the infrastructure needed is already in place, the decision was made to focus on adding these datasets as a high priority in the project via a series of dedicated BYOD’s.

With respect to the infrastructure it was agreed that the ODEX4all infrastructure is essentially the first multidisciplinary FAIRport in the life sciences. All data published in the project will be FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable). Therefore, the Odex4all team will work closely with the DTL FAIR data team, and will seek active collaboration with sister projects working on FAIR data (f.i. BBMRI-NL,TraIT, Open PHACTS, FAIRdom, EuroCAt, SADI,Bio2RDF, Breed4Food, VLPB, CEDAR and the general FAIRport initiative). The first direct engineering task of the ODEX4all tech team is the development of a ‘triple annotator’ that will allow the annotation of individual triples in the ODEX4all graph. Those annotations will automatically be published in an Open Access nanopublication store and offered to both private and public parties to improve their original data sources.

In short: Odex4all will use and add existing databases in FAIR format, will reuse, connect and expand existing FAIR data infrastructures and will work in close synergy with sister projects to realise the first multidisciplinary FAIRport in the life sciences.