Overview of BioSharing

Research communities, funding agencies, and journals participate in the development of reporting standards for the bioscience domain to ensure that shared experiments are reported with enough information to be comprehensible and (in principle) reproducible, compared or integrated (Field, Sansone et al., Science, 2009). Similar trends in both the regulatory arena and commercial science.

Proliferation of standards is a positive sign of stakeholders’ engagement, but how much do we know about these standards? Which ones are mature and stable enough to use or recommend? Which tools and databases implement which standard? Etc...

The BioSharing catalogue (www.biosharing.org) aims to
1. centralize community-developed bioscience standards, linking to policies, other portals, open access resources and lists of tools and databases implementing the standards;
2. develop and maintain a set of criteria for assessing the usability and popularity of the standards, also the interoperability and relations among them;
3. foster interoperability, addressing overlaps and duplication of efforts that hamper their wider uptake and interfere with the creation of standards-compliant systems.
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