Wheat Data Interoperability Guidelines, Ontologies and User Cases. Recommendations from the RDA Wheat Data Interoperability Working Group

The International Wheat Initiative (http://www.wheatinitiative.org) has identified the easy access and interoperability of all wheat related data as a top priority for the wheat research community. An important goal is to make the best use of existing genetic, genomic, and phenotypic data in fundamental and applied wheat science. Hence, data interoperability has become a priority in this community, given the ever-growing data deluge coming from improvements in technologies and numeric methods for DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) and RNA (Ribonucleic acid) sequencing, high throughput genotyping and phenotyping, high throughput imaging and satellite monitoring. The Wheat Data Interoperability working group (WDI-WG) was created in 2014 as a Research Data Alliance (RDA, http://rd-alliance.org) working group under the umbrella of Wheat Information System (WheatIS, http://wheatis.org/) expert working group, which is endorsed by the International Wheat Initiative to build an international information system for genetic, genomic, and phenomic data. The primary mission of the WDI-WG is to provide a common framework for describing and representing data with respect to existing open standards. The WDI-WG is formed by data and information practitioners and scientists from different organizations and countries. The standpoint of the WDI-WG was to avoid the creation of new standards. Therefore, the WDI-WG started by surveying the practices of the wheat research community, then converged and agreed on specific recommendations. The proposed recommendations have been endorsed by the RDA and the WheatIS expert working group.