Advancing microbiome science together
Enabling microbiome exploration
Founded to support the long-term advancement of microbiome science, the NMDC is building an agile, integrated data ecosystem. Our scientific mission is to provide comprehensive discovery of and access to multi-omics microbiome data. The long-term vision of the NMDC is to support microbiome data exploration through a sustainable data discovery portal that promotes open science and shared-ownership.
Supporting a collaborative data ecosystem
The NMDC seeks to connect and engage the microbiome community by unlocking new possibilities with microbiome data science. Focusing on broad and inclusive activities we aim to empower participation in data curation, discovery, and analytical processes using active partnerships among the research community. This regular and continuous engagement ensures that development aligns and adapts to the current and future needs of the research community.
Building community-supported microbiome data science capabilities
Standards with expert curation
Map existing ontologies and standard vocabularies to the rich contextual metadata used to describe sample collection and processing.
Use ontology mapping tools and curation resources to enable automated annotation of standardized metadata to adhere to the FAIR principles.
Gold-standard pipelines
Develop microbiome workflows for metagenome, metatranscriptome, metaproteome, and metabolomics data processing leveraging high performance compute (HPC) systems
Generate and integrate interoperable and reusable microbiome data from pilot data providers
Data integration and access
Iteratively develop a graphical web-based interface that streamlines search, data exploration, and discovery.
Provide access to FAIR multidisciplinary data and standardized, reproducible data products for comparative analyses.
Community Engagement
Establish support for open science and FAIR microbiome data across research teams through a tiered engagement model.
Partner with publishers, funders, and scientific societies and consortiums to incentivize data sharing and reuse.
Building a world where data are FAIR
Over the past few decades, microbiome data have grown exponentially. However, the sheer amount of data available presents a significant bottleneck for analysis and interpretation. The NMDC makes these data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) by:
Findable
Ensure all data registered within NMDC are human and machine readable
Accessible
Identify data sets that are available, including any authentication and authorization requirements
Interoperable
Provide provenance, metadata, and uniformly processed data, we are lowering the barriers to making data interoperable
Reusable
Enable download of data, data products, and workflows for external reprocessing
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