Genetics

The Access to Biological Collections Data (ABCD) Schema is an evolving comprehensive standard for the access to and exchange of data about specimens and observations (a.k.a. primary biodiversity data). The ABCD Schema attempts to be comprehensive and highly structured, supporting data from a wide variety of databases. It is compatible with several existing data standards. Parallel structures exist so that either (or both) atomised data and free-text can be accommodated.

The ABCD Schema was ratified as a standard by the Biodiversity Information Standards Taxonomic Databases Working Group (TDWG) in 2005. It was developed as a community-driven effort, with contributions from CODATA, BioCASE and GBIF among other organizations.

An extension of the ABCD standard for DNA data.

Genome metadata on PATRIC consists of 61 different metadata fields, called attributes, which are organized into the following seven broad categories: Organism Info, Isolate Info, Host Info, Sequence Info, Phenotype Info, Project Info, and Others.

The Investigation/Study/Assay (ISA) tab-delimited (TAB) format is a general purpose framework with which to collect and communicate complex metadata (i.e. sample characteristics, technologies used, type of measurements made) from 'omics-based' experiments employing a combination of technologies.

Created by core developers from the University of Oxford, ISA-TAB v1.0 was released in November 2008.

The MIBBI Project was an international collaboration seeking to harmonize the efforts of the various bioscience communities developing Minimum Information (MI) reporting guidelines or checklists. Approximately 40 such checklists registered with the project.

The MIBBI Foundry was an attempt to identify common features of the various MI checklists and codify them into modules. The aim was to evolve the existing checklists towards formal intercompatibility, and to enable new checklists to be produced by selecting and extending the available modules.

The concept was realized initially through the joint efforts of the Proteomics Standards Initiative, the Genomic Standards Consortium and the MGED RSBI Working Groups.

While the MIBBI Foundry did not develop to the point where it could become a true, technical parent standard for the MI checklists, the MIBBI Project provided a useful grouping of standards that shared a common purpose, philosophy and inspiration.

A list of nearly 40 Minimum Information standards projects registered with the MIBBI initiative.

MIxS is a superset of metadata elements that can be used to compile minimum information checklists for reporting sequencing data. It was developed by the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) as an overarching framework that could act as a single entry point for all their minimum information checklists (as reported in Nature Biotechnology).

MIxS includes the technology-specific checklists from the previous MIGS and MIMS standards (for genomes and metagenomes respectively), provides a way of introducing additional checklists such as MIMARKS (for marker sequences), and also allows annotation of sample data using environmental packages.

Some repositories have decided that current standards do not fit their metadata needs, and so have created their own requirements.