Marco Roos

The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship

There is an urgent need to improve the infrastructure supporting the reuse of scholarly data. A diverse set of stakeholders—representing academia, industry, funding agencies, and scholarly publishers—have come together to design and jointly endorse a concise and measureable set of principles that we refer to as the FAIR Data Principles. The intent is that these may act as a guideline for those wishing to enhance the reusability of their data holdings. Distinct from peer initiatives that focus on the human scholar, the FAIR Principles put specific emphasis on enhancing the ability of machines to automatically find and use the data, in addition to supporting its reuse by individuals. This Comment is the first formal publication of the FAIR Principles, and includes the rationale behind them, and some exemplar implementations in the community.

myExperiment: a repository and social network for the sharing of bioinformatics workflows

myExperiment (http://www.myexperiment.org) is an online research environment that supports the social sharing of bioinformatics workflows. These workflows are procedures consisting of a series of computational tasks using web services, which may be performed on data from its retrieval, integration and analysis, to the visualization of the results. As a public repository of workflows, myExperiment allows anybody to discover those that are relevant to their research, which can then be reused and repurposed to their specific requirements. Conversely, developers can submit their workflows to myExperiment and enable them to be shared in a secure manner. Since its release in 2007, myExperiment currently has over 3500 registered users and contains more than 1000 workflows. The social aspect to the sharing of these workflows is facilitated by registered users forming virtual communities bound together by a common interest or research project. Contributors of workflows can build their reputation within these communities by receiving feedback and credit from individuals who reuse their work. Further documentation about myExperiment including its REST web service is available from http://wiki.myexperiment.org. Feedback and requests for support can be sent to bugs@myexperiment.org.

BioCatalogue: a universal catalogue of web services for the life sciences

The use of Web Services to enable programmatic access to on-line bioinformatics is becoming increasingly important in the Life Sciences. However, their number, distribution and the variable quality of their documentation can make their discovery and subsequent use difficult. A Web Services registry with information on available services will help to bring together service providers and their users. The BioCatalogue (http://www.biocatalogue.org/) provides a common interface for registering, browsing and annotating Web Services to the Life Science community. Services in the BioCatalogue can be described and searched in multiple ways based upon their technical types, bioinformatics categories, user tags, service providers or data inputs and outputs. They are also subject to constant monitoring, allowing the identification of service problems and changes and the filtering-out of unavailable or unreliable resources. The system is accessible via a human-readable ‘Web 2.0’-style interface and a programmatic Web Service interface. The BioCatalogue follows a community approach in which all services can be registered, browsed and incrementally documented with annotations by any member of the scientific community.

The value of data

Data citation and the derivation of semantic constructs directly from datasets have now both found their place in scientific communication. The social challenge facing us is to maintain the value of traditional narrative publications and their relationship to the datasets they report upon while at the same time developing appropriate metrics for citation of data and data constructs.

Data Lineage Model for Taverna Workflows with Lightweight Annotation Requirements

The provenance, or lineage , of a workflow data product can be reconstructed by keeping a complete trace of workflow execution. This lineage information, however, is likely to be both imprecise, because of the black-box nature of the services that compose the workflow, and noisy, because of the many trivial data transformations that obscure the intended purpose of the workflow. In this paper we argue that these shortcomings can be alleviated by introducing a small set of optional lightweight annotations to the workflow, in a principled way. We begin by presenting a baseline, annotation-free lineage model for the Taverna workflow system, and then show how the proposed annotations improve the results of fundamental lineage queries.

Molecular phylogeny of Coelogyne (Epidendroideae; Orchidaceae) based on plastid RFLPS, matK, and nuclear ribosomal ITS sequences: evidence for polyphyly

To evaluate the monophyly of Coelogyne (Epidendroideae; Orchidaceae) and reveal sectional relationships and relations to allied genera in subtribe Coelogyninae, we collected PCR (polymerase chain reaction) amplified restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLPs) from 11 plastid regions for 42 taxa (28 Coelogyne species and 14 representatives of other genera) and three outgroups from Bletiinae and Thuniinae. We also sequenced a large portion of the plastid trnK intron (mostly matK) and the nuclear ribosomal DNA internal transcribed spacers ITS1 and ITS2 (including the 5.8S gene). Separate phylogenetic analyses on each data set using maximum parsimony produced mainly congruent (except for the position of Panisea) but weakly supported clades. Parsimony analysis of the combined data clearly identified three main clades in Coelogyninae. Whereas Coelogyninae are monophyletic, Coelogyne is polyphyletic, with species falling into at least two well-supported clades. The utility of morphological characters used in previous classifications was explored by reconstructing character state evolution on one of the four molecular trees. Lip base and petal shape were homoplasious, whereas ovary indumentum and flower number were congruent with well-supported groups. The implications of our results for the classification of Coelogyne are discussed, and a reorganization of the genus by including Neogyna and Pholidota and removing several species is proposed.

Why workflows break — Understanding and combating decay in Taverna workflows

Workflows provide a popular means for preserving scientific methods by explicitly encoding their process. However, some of them are subject to a decay in their ability to be re-executed or reproduce the same results over time, largely due to the volatility of the resources required for workflow executions. This paper provides an analysis of the root causes of workflow decay based on an empirical study of a collection of Taverna workflows from the myExperiment repository. Although our analysis was based on a specific type of workflow, the outcomes and methodology should be applicable to workflows from other systems, at least those whose executions also rely largely on accessing third-party resources. Based on our understanding about decay we recommend a minimal set of auxiliary resources to be preserved together with the workflows as an aggregation object and provide a software tool for end-users to create such aggregations and to assess their completeness.

Microattribution and nanopublication as means to incentivize the placement of human genome variation data into the public domain

The advances in bioinformatics required to annotate human genomic variants and to place them in public data repositories have not kept pace with their discovery. Moreover, a law of diminishing returns has begun to operate both in terms of data publication and submission. Although the continued deposition of such data in the public domain is essential to maximize both their scientific and clinical utility, rewards for data sharing are few, representing a serious practical impediment to data submission. To date, two main strategies have been adopted as a means to encourage the submission of human genomic variant data: (1) database journal linkups involving the affiliation of a scientific journal with a publicly available database and (2) microattribution, involving the unambiguous linkage of data to their contributors via a unique identifier. The latter could in principle lead to the establishment of a microcitation‐tracking system that acknowledges individual endeavor and achievement. Both approaches could incentivize potential data contributors, thereby encouraging them to share their data with the scientific community. Here, we summarize and critically evaluate approaches that have been proposed to address current deficiencies in data attribution and discuss ways in which they could become more widely adopted as novel scientific publication modalities. Hum Mutat 33:1503–1512, 2012.

Analysing Scientific Workflows: Why Workflows Not Only Connect Web Services

Life science workflow systems are developed to help life scientists to conveniently connect various programs and web services. In practice however, much time is spent on data conversion, because web services provided by different organisations use different data formats. We have analysed all the Taverna workflows available at the my Experiment web site on December 11, 2008. Our analysis of the tasks in these workflows shows several noticeable aspects: their number ranges from 1 to 70 tasks per workflow; 18% of the workflows consist of a single task.Of the tasks used are 22% web services; local services, i.e. tasks executed by the workflow system itself, are very popular and cover 57% of tasks; tasks implemented by the workflow designer, scripting tasks, are is also used often (14%). Our analysis shows that over 30\% of tasks are related to data conversion.

Cellular localization of oriC during the cell cycle of Escherichia coli as analyzed by fluorescent in situ hybridization

The origin of replication of Escherichia coli, oriC, has been labeled by fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH). The E. coli K12 strain was grown under steady state conditions with a doubling time of 79 min at 28 degrees C. Under these growth conditions DNA replication starts in the previous cell cycle at -33 min. At birth cells possess two origins which are visible as two separated foci in fully labeled cells. The number of foci increased with cell length. The distance of foci from the nearest cell pole has been measured in various length classes. The data suggest: i) that the two most outwardly located foci keep a constant distance to the cell pole and they therefore move apart gradually in line with cell elongation; and ii) that at the initiation of DNA replication the labeled origins occur near the center of prospective daughter cells.