Taking a big step towards advancing interoperability and promoting excellence in scientific research, ELIXIR has officially designated the FAIR Cookbook and OpenEBench as ELIXIR Recommended Interoperability Resources (RIRs). This recognition highlights the relevant roles these two resources, supported by the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB), the Spanish Node of ELIXIR, play in promoting the adoption of FAIR principles and enhancing the efficiency of scientific workflows.
FAIR Cookbook: A Recipe for FAIR Data Management
The FAIR Cookbook, co-created by pharma and academic data scientists in the context of the IMI2 FAIRplus project, is a comprehensive collection of recipes offering a birds-eye view of FAIR components to facilitate the application of FAIR principles and infrastructure needed for FAIR data management. Recognized by the Innovative Health Initiative (IMI/IHI) and the Horizon Europe Health programs, the FAIR Cookbook has been enriched with recipes from other European projects, such as FAIR4Health. It is now an integral part of ELIXIR's strategy program. Hospital Universitario Vírgen del Rocío - Instituto de Biomedicina de Sevilla (HUVdR-IBIS) and Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), both INB/ELIXIR-ES members, in collaboration with colleagues from other ELIXIR nodes - specifically from the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, and Switzerland - and the US NIH Office of Data Science Strategy, co-lead the resource's maintenance and evolution.
OpenEBench: Benchmarking Excellence in Bioinformatics
OpenEBench, the ELIXIR community-driven scientific benchmarking and technical monitoring platform, aims to assess the quality of bioinformatics tools, web servers, and workflows. It plays an essential role in promoting ELIXIR's guidelines and technologies, including ELIXIR AAI, software development best practices, and FAIR data principles. Developed by the BSC in collaboration with ELIXIR nodes in Norway, Italy, Greece, the Czech Republic, and Switzerland, OpenEBench is a key component of the ELIXIR Tools platform.
The FAIR Cookbook and OpenEBench join a roster of key ELIXIR Recommended Interoperability Resources (RIRs) that aim to foster collaboration, standardisation, and adherence to FAIR principles within the broad Life Sciences scientific community. Other ELIXIR RIRs developed by ELIXIR Spain are 3DBIONOTES API, a reusable platform-independent API call component for protein and gene metadata alignment, annotation, and integration across major bioinformatic data resources, FAIRtracks, a JSON Schema defining a draft standard for minimal genomic track metadata, and DisGeNET RDF API, an RDF SPARQL Endpoint for DisGeNET, a knowledge platform on human disease genes and variants.