Niklas Blomberg, Ph.D Director, ELIXIR

Open access to bioinformatics resources provides a valuable path to discovery. ELIXIR is identifying core data resources that are essential to the larger international community and is developing a robust framework to secure their long-term sustainability and accessibility. Some of these datasets are highly specialised and would previously only have been available to researchers within the country/state in which they were generated.

ELIXIR, a research infrastructure founded by 17 European countries and EMBL-EBI, has been formed to orchestrate the collection, quality control and archiving of large amounts of biological data produced by life science experiments. By coordinating local, national and international resources – hosted at over 120 institutes - the ELIXIR infrastructure will meet the data-related needs of Europe’s 500,000 life-scientists.

The challenges in storing, integrating and analysing the data from modern biological experiments needs a coordinated effort that involves both national and international resources. ELIXIR is currently constructing a distributed e‐infrastructure of bioinformatics services – a data nodes network - built around established European centres of excellence. This talk will discuss our approaches to handling, analysing and archiving large and also highly diverse data‐sets. Furthermore the talk will discuss experiences in data integration and the need for establishing data‐management plans within projects that address the issues of meta‐data annotation and long term archiving.