CORBEL Access to Sustainable cross infrastructure identifier service(s) through ELIXIR service registry

The CORBEL project operates across 13 individual BMS RIs, each of which have developed over time towards service provision targeted to support their individual user communities. Hence, there are potentially differences in data handling and processing resulting from community specific preferences and customs (for example the deposition of data into preferred repositories), which will
differ across infrastructures. These potential disparities will need to be addressed to harmonise data and services across RIs, and is fundamental to enable downstream and wide scale interoperability.
The work described here addresses the specific objective: “Improve interoperability with European e-infrastructures and leverage existing investments these capacities within the biomedical and life science domain”, as detailed in the DoW1. This work involved input from and collaboration with 13 RIs, with 36 submitted project proposals (to date), and engaged numerous service providers. We
detail below the work, how it was conducted, as well as providing the feedback from the crossinfrastructure partners. We also distilled from these observations a set of recommendations to improve such endeavours in the future.
To achieve “Access to Sustainable cross infrastructure identifier service(s) through ELIXIR service registry”, we have identified and promoted the following Interoperability Registry Services, with particular focus placed on components ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘d’:
a) An identifier registry, with resolution capability (https://identifiers.org/)
b) An Ontology registry, with cross-referencing capability (Ontology Lookup Service, OLS https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ols/index)
c) A Standards registry (FAIRsharing: https://fairsharing.org/)
d) A tools registry (https://bio.tools/)
Project proposals accepted through scientific CORBEL WP4 review were subsequently processed to identify and register project components to the most appropriate registry. Further details and feedback were solicited, from both scientists and service providers, for a prioritised subset of projects deemed most likely to benefit from additional interoperability evaluation. Over the course of this work, we have identified gaps in knowledge that warrant further exploration. Combined with our collective experiences (across WP partners, scientists and service providers), this feedback was used to generate a list of recommendations for future such operations.