Wheat Data Interoperability Guidelines v1.0, September 2015

These recommendations have been prepared by members of the Wheat Data Interoperability Working Group (WG), one of the WGs of the Research Data Alliance and the only WG of the Agriculture Data Interoperability Interest Group. The group is coordinated by members of the Wheat Initiative, a global initiative that aims to reinforce synergies between bread and durum wheat national and international research programmes to increase food security, nutritional value and safety while taking into account societal demands for sustainable and resilient agricultural production systems. It is further supported by several additional WG members from all over the world. More specifically, the WG aims to:

  • Promote the adoption of common standards, vocabularies and best practices for Wheat data management
  • Facilitate access, discovery and reuse of Wheat data
  • Facilitate Wheat data integration

The WG aims to provide a common framework for describing, representing linking and publishing Wheat data with respect to existing open standards. This framework is expected to promote and sustain Wheat data sharing, reusability and operability. The group’s work is based principally on the the needs of the Wheat Initiative’s Information System (WheatIS) in terms of functionalities and data types; in this context, the working group will identify relevant use cases in order to produce a “cookbook” on how to produce “wheat data” that are easily shareable, reusable and interoperable.

The work done in the context of the RDA WG is mainly guided by the outcomes of a survey report that was implemented in June 2012 by the Wheat Initiative. Taking the outcomes of this report as the framework for this work, the WG has focused on specific data types of interest to the Wheat research community (namely, by order of priority: SNP, Genomic annotations, Phenotypes, Genetic Maps, Physical Maps & Germplasm). Based on this report, the members of the RDA Wheat Data Interoperability WG have been exploring all available resources by contacting external collaborators, researchers in wheat data as well as people who are working with wheat research data in general.

It is important to note that the guidelines have been developed in a way that will allow them to be adapted for other crops such as rice and maize, which play a very important role in human nutrition and food security.

The Wheat Data Interoperability Guidelines are now available.  They are built on existing standards to describe wheat data such as:

  • SNPs
  • Genomic Annotations
  • Phenotypes
  • Genetic Maps
  • Physical Maps
  • Germplasms
  • Gene Expression

The Wheat Data Interoperability Guidelines describe a set of guidance rules to foster Wheat data interoperability, with the purpose of helping researchers create, manage and exchange Wheat Data.