Recently the Dutch research council (NWO) and the Netherlands eScience Center announced that they will co-fund the proposal called ODEX4all: Open Discovery and Exchange of (big) data in the Life Science, for the next 2 years. The project aims to address the semantic aspects of the ‘Big Data’ challenges in the life sciences by realising full interoperability on key public and proprietary information across ‘red’ (human), ‘green’ (plant) and ‘white’ (food & nutrition) data sets. The project will contribute to the Interoperability theme of DTL Data and is closely linked to the FAIRPORT initiative.
The project will address one of the key issues which currently inhibits the evolution of traditional science to eScience: the unprecedented production volumes of academic and private sector data resulting in storage, interoperability and analysis issues of such massive and disparate data sets making it increasingly difficult for specific core scientific assertions to be found, connected, shared, attributed and curated.
The project will provide a technical scoping & feasibility study for the delivery of semantic web (Nanopublication) based capabilities to scientific organisations such as TI Pharma, TTI Green Genetics and TI Food and Nutrition (as lead organisations for the project), but essentially to the entire Life Science community in the context of the developing DTL Data programme within the Dutch Techcentre for Life Sciences. This would basically enable an Open Data EXchange (ODEX) for all interested parties in the Life Sciences. It should be noted that although the initial project will cover data which is relevant for the Life Sciences, the technology platform will be applicable for any scientific area.
The PI of the project is Barend Mons of the Leiden University Medical Center. The approach is very closely reated to the semantic technology as currently very succesfully deployed in the Open PHACTS IMI project in which LUMC, NBIC, UVA and the University of Maastricht are core partners.
Other people and organisations involved are:
- DSM
- Erasmus MC
- EURETOS
- FOM-Nikhef
- LUMC
- Maastricht University
- NBIC
- NIZO food research
- Phortos Consultants
- Radboud Universiteit
- ResearchAnt
- Roche Diagnostics
- Vilmorin & Cie
- VU
- WUR