ELIXIR recognises 3 UK services for enabling data interoperability

ELIXIR announces the addition of three ELIXIR-UK services as Recommended Interoperability Resources (RIR): FAIR Cookbook, Jalview and RDMkit. Out of the seven selected RIRs this year, three of them are ELIXIR-UK services, recognising the valuable contributions of the UK Node members and organisations.

These additions signify the effort of such resources in fostering data interoperability, aligning with Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data principles.

Accessible to all free of charge, ELIXIR RIRs are often referenced by research funding agencies as an instrument for researchers to fulfil their data management requirements and advance research.

ELIXIR’s list of Recommended Interoperability Resources includes critical tools, registries and standards key to enhancing interoperability. A comprehensive internal and external evaluation process ensures that each RIR satisfies fundamental criteria, including:

• Establishing connections between data (and other) resources
• Acquiring and exposing metadata of data (and other) resources
• Creating the infrastructure needed to build integratable data collections
• Using interoperability resources to support delivery of FAIR principles

FAIR Cookbook

The FAIR Cookbook is a collection of bird’ s-eye view recipes on the FAIR components, the infrastructure needed, and a set of applied examples in the Life Sciences, offering a deep dive into the technical aspects of FAIR data management. Co-created by Pharma and academic data scientists,  it aims to develop and disseminate guidance and processes needed to make and keep data FAIR in the Life Sciences. The FAIR Cookbook is already a recommended resource by the IMI/IHI and the Horizon Europe Health programmes, and it is a core component of the new ELIXIR strategy programme.

The ELIXIR-UK members co-lead this resource, its maintenance and evolution, along with colleagues in the Luxembourg, Swiss, and Spain Node, and with the participation of the US NIH Office of Data Science Strategy. 

Jalview

Jalview is an open-source platform for biomolecular sequence alignment visualisation that can be run from the command line, desktop, and web. Created in 1996, it has been continuously developed to keep pace with the changing needs of researchers, students and educators. Jalview employs a range of public biological data and analysis services to enable retrieval, alignment, and analysis of richly annotated DNA, RNA and protein sequences linked with phylogenetic trees and 3D structures. Interoperation with other tools, such as Jmol, VARNA, Chimera, ChimeraX, and Pymol, allows visualisation and analysis of 2D and 3D structures linked with alignments.  Jalview also provides an easy way to access a range of other key tools and services provided by EMBL-EBI ELIXIR-UK member organisations.

Jalview’s development is led by the Barton group, part of the ELIXIR-UK member organisation at the University of Dundee. Many members of ELIXIR-UK and the broader community employ Jalview in teaching and research and help guide its continued development, including the Orengo group at UCL and EMBL-EBI’s PDBe-KB team. 

RDMkit

The ELIXIR Research Data Management Kit (RDMkit) is a resource designed to guide life scientists in their efforts to better manage their research data following the FAIR Principles. Maintained by the ELIXIR community, the resource creates content around the stages of the data lifecycle, specific life science domains, and different personas involved in life sciences data management. Highlighted in the Horizon Europe Program Guide, RDMkit empowers researchers to cultivate high-quality data management practices.

The ELIXIR-UK community has significantly contributed to the content creation, editorial services, and overall resource maintenance thus far and will continue to do so in the future.

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For further information and access to these resources, please visit ELIXIR’s RIR webpage.

To visit the official announcement from ELIXIR Europe, visit their news release.