Bioschemas: moving forward

Dear All

It’s coming up to one year after we really started our work on Bioschemas for datasets and its time to take stock. Reflection has been prompted, too, by comments by the reviewers of our application to ELIXIR for an implementation study and by helpful but searching comments by the ELIXIR SAB.

We have been more successful than we could have hoped for. Great meetings and more coming up (the samples hackathon is in March). Bioschemas is referred to by funders, programmes and research projects not just in Europe and not just in biosciences. You have been great in getting the profiles booted up and in your advocacy.

That said, to move on, to raise the funds we need, and to address our critics, we need to do some serious housekeeping on our website and our profiles and we need to demonstrate take-up and impact of the mark-up.

In the short-term we propose to take steps to consolidate where we are with Bioschemas, publicising much more what has been achieved, identifying the individuals that have contributed to that work, and making it more clear how to engage in Bioschemas activities, including providing templates and examples. These are some of the shortcomings identified by reviewers, each of which should be easily addressable. We need to ensure that every profile has suitable documentation (profile, use case, examples, etc).

Having seen the way things are really working out we propose to drop the map2model approach and manage everything through GitHub. This will give us the flexibility that we need as a community for our different working approaches, and the visibility of our processes that we need for external reviewers and new community members.

In the coming weeks you will see a lot of activity by Kenneth and Ricardo (the new intern at the Hub dedicated to Bioschemas), who will be working to consolidate and clean-up the Bioschemas profiles and the website. We aim to complete this for key profiles (DataCatalog, Dataset, Protein, Sample) ahead of the Samples workshop in March. Some of this work has already commenced, e.g. the return of the Groups page<http://bioschemas.org/groups/> on the website.

Please help Kenneth and Ricardo to assist in clarifying content or approve revisions, especially when they email you. We will be taking stock again in a month’s time.

As we move from our start up implementation study to a community, we will also be developing a wider and more open governance group to define process, a roadmap and build our impact and funding portfolio. More on this over the next month too.

We have opted for the most practical and least resource intensive approach, allowing us to  achieve our goals of consolidating the community’s activities. We will make it clearer how to contribute to the Bioschemas community, and be the basis for getting adoption and the take-up we need.

Very best
Alasdair, Carole, Rafa and Nick


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