Supporting Interdisciplinary Sample Data Discovery, Integration, and Reuse

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The joint ESIP/RDA Physical Samples webinar in October will explore current and planned approaches to support interdisciplinary sample data discovery, integration, and reuse from the perspectives of experts in geoscience, genomics, and biodiversity sample data. 

There is a growing need to support physical sample data management, discovery, and reuse for interdisciplinary work. In fact, many scientific projects utilize a variety of biological and environmental sample types to help address interdisciplinary questions, such as those involving ecosystem processes. A unified approach to report basic information about samples and federated search tools can therefore help facilitate sample discovery, access, data synthesis, and interdisciplinary research. Kerstin Lehnert will discuss how the ‘Sampling Nature’ Research Coordination Network and the iSamples (Internet of Samples) efforts plan to advance community collaboration and cyberinfrastructure for sample data discovery across disciplines. The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Genbank database has a long history of providing openly available genomic DNA sequencing information, with lessons that are useful to a broader physical samples community. Ilene Karsch Mizrachi will discuss how data linkages make it easier to find, integrate, and reuse genomics data stored at NCBI and specimens housed in repositories. Ontologies offer precisely defined vocabularies, robust pathways for data integration, and support for automated machine reasoning. John Deck will then present an approach for using ontologies to assist with integrating and linking biodiversity data while inferring new information from source datasets. More fully supporting interdisciplinary science may require integrating certain semantic and identifier approaches across a range of scientific disciplines.  

The webinar will be of interest to researchers who work with a variety of sample types (e.g. biological and environmental) and/or interdisciplinary sample data in their research, and data managers who assist with curating interdisciplinary samples and datasets for repositories.

Presenters

Kerstin A. Lehnert ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7036-1977 Columbia University  Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Doherty Senior Research Scientist USA Kerstin Lehnert is Director of the Geoinformatics Research Group at LDEO, Columbia University. She holds a PhD in Petrology/Geochemistry. Her efforts focus on the development of community-driven data infrastructures in the Earth, environmental, and planetary sciences with a focus on observational data generated from physical samples.

Ilene Karsch Mizrachi ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0289-7101  National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health National Center for Biotechnology Information Program Head, Sequence Archives and Submissions USA Ilene has worked at GenBank for more than 25 years.  She is committed to the principles of open science and open data.   John Deck ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5905-1617  University of California at Berkeley Berkeley Natural History Museums Researcher USA John is a research programmer at UC Berkeley, Berkeley Natural History Museums as well as owner of Biocode, LLC a software development company specializing in tracking biological samples.  He also co-owns Deck Family Farm, a diversified livestock farm in Oregon.

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