The IFB Catalogue

The IFB Catalogue is a centralized database developed as part of the IFB Distributed national environment of services in Bioinformatics. Its aim is to ensure the visibility and accessibility of the Bioinformatics resources provided and maintained by the french community, whether these are research labs or service platforms, in a structured and open database that guarantees their FAIRness. Such resources can be software tools, databases, computing resources, individual expertises, platforms, trainings and training materials. This catalogue stores the metadata describing their properties (e.g. the licence of a software tool) and linking them (e.g. the publication of a database by a given team).

The primary role of the Catalogue is to help users of Bioinformatics services. Through the integration of the data in the IFB website (https://www.france-bioinformatique.fr), it provides an overview of the various resources provided by the community, and supports the needs of end-users (who can perform a given kind of analysis? where is a tool available?). It is also synchronized with related international catalogues (e.g. ELIXIR bio.tools[1] , TeSS[2]), and promotes the reusability of the data through the publication of Bioschemas[3] markup and REST APIs as well as the use of the EDAM ontology[4].

The backend server is available at https://catalogue.france-bioinformatique.fr/. The code of the Catalogue
database backend is openly available on https://github.com/IFB-ElixirFr/ifbcat