An Information System for European culture collections: the way forward

作者：Serge Casarégola, Alexander Vasilenko, Paolo Romano, Vincent Robert, S. M. Ozerskaya, Anna Kopf, Frank Oliver Glöckner, David Smith · 发表于：SpringerPlus · 年份：2016 · DOI：10.1186/s40064-016-2450-8 · 被引用次数：12 · 研究领域：Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies、Scientific Computing and Data Management、Semantic Web and Ontologies

Culture collections contain indispensable information about the microorganisms preserved in their repositories, such as taxonomical descriptions, origins, physiological and biochemical characteristics, bibliographic references, etc. However, information currently accessible in databases rarely adheres to common standard protocols. The resultant heterogeneity between culture collections, in terms of both content and format, notably hampers microorganism-based research and development (R&D). The optimized exploitation of these resources thus requires standardized, and simplified, access to the associated information. To this end, and in the interest of supporting R&D in the fields of agriculture, health and biotechnology, a pan-European distributed research infrastructure, MIRRI, including over 40 public culture collections and research institutes from 19 European countries, was established. A prime objective of MIRRI is to unite and provide universal access to the fragmented, and untapped, resources, information and expertise available in European public collections of microorganisms; a key component of which is to develop a dynamic Information System. For the first time, both culture collection curators as well as their users have been consulted and their feedback, concerning the needs and requirements for collection databases and data accessibility, utilised. Users primarily noted that databases were not interoperable, thus rendering a global search of multiple databases imp...