The first Bring Your Own Template (BYOT) meeting, organised by DTL/ELIXIR-NL, BioMedBridges, the FAIRport initiative, BBMRI-NL, CTMM/TraIT, focussed on preparation for sharing and integration of data structures used for data capture, also known as ‘data templates’. This was motivated by a range of related activities in the space of ‘experimental data mapping and pooling’, in particular EU-BioMedBridges model registry, EU-BioSHaRE/DataSHaPER biobank pooling, ODEX4ALL, and most notably the FAIRport initiative.
The BYOT was inspired by a previous DTL Focus meeting on study capturing in Maastricht, where people active in the phenotype database project (dbNP/dbXP now also covered by ENPADASI), the Molgenis using EU-BioSHaRE project, ISAtab-nano users (through eNanoMapper), and the bacterial systems biology resource Sysmo participated, with some input from DiXa and the ISAtools groups.
During the BYOT two template catalogue initiatives were presented:
- Template registry of Phenotype / DBNP database, build on the generic study capture framework.
- BioMedBridges ‘Metadata model and mapping registry (M3R)’, that is setup to catalogue data models of any kind and to enable data bridges between them via mapping (formats, templates, guidelines, dictionaries), build on the MOLGENIS platform and BiobankConnect.org mapping tool.
It was concluded that the M3R could provide a good starting point to bring templates into the same space. catalogue mappings between them and be presented as prototype ‘FAIR Data Point’. A FAIR Data Point is a software layer on top of a data resource that provides FAIR access to the data. The FAIR Data Point is mainly responsible for intermediating the access to the data resource, enforcing the license of the data resource and gathering metrics for data usage.
Several templates (Phenotype, ISATAB-Nano) were converted to the M3R format and demonstration projects were defined.