FAIR Bioinformatics computation and data management: FAIRDOM and the Norwegian Digital Life initiative

The FAIR data principles state that data should be Findable (and citable), Accessible (with appropriate caveats for sensitive data), Interoperable (able to be exchanged or combined, typically as a result of using community standards) and Reusable (can be reused later or reproduced from a publication). The FAIRDOM Research Infrastructure (http://fair-dom.org) has been fostering software and community activities to support the adoption of FAIR data management practices since 2008. The SEEK software component of FAIRDOM provides a web-based yellow pages (of programmes, projects, institutions and people), a catalogue of their research assets (data, models, SOPs, samples, organisms, publications etc), and the metadata associated with them. A common, related view of the assets is organised using ISA (Investigation, Study, Assay/Analysis).

The Norwegian e-Infrastructure for Life Sciences (NeLS) is developed and supported by ELIXIR-Norway as a national infrastructure for bioinformatics, providing storage, data sharing and analysis tools (using Galaxy) and connecting to the national data storage platform, NIRD, for long term storage.

FAIRDOM, DLN and ELIXIR-Norway teamed up to support projects in the Digital Life initiative with their FAIR data management. The SEEK and NeLS platforms were adapted to provide functional linking for storing and sharing data sets from NeLS to SEEK. Linking up bioinformatics compute capabilities, with long-term storage and publication of the data.