Collaborative Relationships

A key relationship type for the success of the Initiative is that of ‘Collaborator’. These are organisations that share our vision and with which we work closely. This work can take a number of forms ranging from general interactions and advice (particularly a presence on oversight/managing boards) through to formal projects (we often term as ‘demonstrators’) that have a specified end result.

The number and range of collaborative projects the Initiative is engaged in are too numerous to detail, but an example is given below to illustrate one form that this can take.

'Biologically Aware' Querying

The Initiative has been working for some while now with University and Imperial College’s, London on investigating the benefits of a ‘biologically aware’ (or semantic) approach to data search and retrieval through an active prototype development. 
                          
This project is defining the design approach for the ONIX semantic federated query infrastructure, which relies on ontological representation of resources to allow concept-based query functionality against related data sources. The benefits of this infrastructure is its flexible approach to semantic data integration, supporting maintainability while allowing evolution of existing data sources (in content, structure or semantics) and addition of new data sources.  If realised it could not only make finding the data you specifically require easier, but support the integration of different data sets in novel ways.

The collaboration has developed now into a wider set of interests with other groups also interested in sharing their insights and experience, particularly a number of teams within caBIG® and EMBL-EBI. The former is actively engaged with us to ensure that future caBIG® infrastructure will support such querying across resources attached to their bioinformatics network.

Other Collaborative Relationships

Other Collaborative Relationships include: