Shifting from Documents to Linked, Accessible Data

Welcome to Indigo BioSystem’s blog “Tackling the R&D Data Glut”.  Our goal is to share our thoughts and ideas on dealing with real-world data challenges in the industrial side of the life sciences.  Indigo is made up of experimental scientists, computer science professionals and validation experts all trying to solve one problem: How can software tools improve R&D efficiency and effectiveness by making it possible to integrate data: old and new, collected inside and outside your organization and how to keep today’s formats and annotations from becoming tomorrows legacy nightmare.  We can start by asking two questions:

• What if all project data could be linked making information easy to access quickly?
• What if data flowed smoothly between project teams, external collaborators and remote research locations?

To make data accessible, our products and services focus on open, (mostly XML), data formats when possible.  An example is the HUPO mzML specification.  To make sure data can be linked we are following the work of Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C – whose recent TED talk on linked data is a must see if only to hear him get a crowd chanting “RAW DATA NOW”.

Berners-Lee is passionate about the transition from document-centric to data-centric science.  At Indigo we believe that the shift to a data-centric approach is the key to improving R&D efficiency, speeding products to the market, and also improving food and drug safety.

In future posts I will dig into what we mean by data-centric R&D and how our technology can help make the data being collected throughout the world more valuable by being linked and accessible.