Facilitating Interoperability in Agricultural Research through ELIXIR-supported Metadata Standards

ELIXIR has engaged in the field of agricultural research data management, particularly through initiatives such as Minimum Information About a Plant Phenotyping Experiment (MIAPPE), the Investigation/Study/Assay (ISA) framework, Bioschemas and RO-Crate, to facilitate data interoperability and integration across diverse datasets and domains.

MIAPPE, developed during the ELIXIR-EXCELERATE and transPLANT projects, provides a metadata standard tailored to plant phenotyping experiments, ensuring consistency and completeness in the description of biological samples, experimental protocols and results. The ISA framework provides a comprehensive and generic structure for representing any experimental data. MIAPPE datasets can therefore be represented using the ISA data model, either in ISA-Tab file format or as a native web objects using ISA-JSON, depeding on the use case.

In addition, Bioschemas plays a vital role in improving the discoverability and accessibility of data by promoting the adoption of schema.org markup in life science data. This initiative contributes to the standardisation of metadata and improves the visibility of agricultural research datasets in search engines. RO-Crate complements these efforts by enabling the packaging of research data with Bioschemas, making datasets more transferable, reusable and understandable across different contexts and applications. 

Taken together, these standards developed and supported by ELIXIR serve as cornerstones for connecting disparate agricultural datasets and domains, fostering data integration, collaboration and knowledge discovery.