Challenge

Data Integration

Challenge: Understanding genotype to phenotype relationships can require numerous data types such as genes/proteins/metabolites/etc. with known or suspected roles in diverse response networks. Impediments to data access and analysis include incompatible indexing, non-standardized storage or display formats, and the difficulty of maintaining awareness of new data sets as they are formed or, in time, superseded by continually evolving technologies.

Data Integration Roadmap (photo: T. Lee)

The Data Integration Working Group is investigating and applying methods for describing and unifying data sets into virtual systems that support iPlant project activities. This does not necessarily entail the physical merging of data from different sources. Instead, iPlant builds upon existing middle-ware systems that use metadata to achieve situational awareness of available data, the logical relationships between different data sets, and tools that enable users to find relevant information even when they are not sure what data may exist. The system supports data intended to be publicly distributed, as well as secure, private and/or user-local repositories and enables information to be pipelined into statistical inference, visualization, and/or modeling tools and applications.

Working Group Members

Name	Role	Institution
Chris Jordan	Data Integration Co-Lead	iPlant Collaborative, Texas Advanced Computing Center
Doreen Ware	Data Integration Co-Lead	iPlant Collaborative, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Carolyn Lawrence	Collaborator	Iowa State University
Justin Borevitz	Collaborator	University of Chicago
Christos Noutsis	Collaborator	iPlant Collaborative, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Eva Huala	Collaborator	Stanford University
George Coupland	Collaborator	Max Planck Institute
Dan Stanzione	Collaborator	Texas Advanced Computing Center
Doina Caragea	Collaborator	Kansas State University
Damian Gessler	Collaborator	iPlant Collaborative, The University of Arizona
Ruth Grene	Collaborator	Virginia Tech
Pankaj Jaiswal	Collaborator	Oregon State University
Jim Jones	Collaborator	University of Florida
Lukas Mueller	Collaborator	Cornell University
Jerry Lu	Collaborator	Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Nirav Merchant	Collaborator	The iPlant Collaborative
Qi Sun	Collaborator	Cornell University
Sudha Ram	Collaborator	iPlant Collaborative, The University of Arizona
Steve Goff	Collaborator	iPlant Collaborative, The University of Arizona
Matt Vaughn	Scientific Lead	iPlant Collaborative, Texas Advanced Computing Center
Steve Welch	Collaborator	Kansas State University
Weijia Xu	Collaborator	iPlant Collaborative, Texas Advanced Computing Center