1. Future-proofing and maximizing the utility of metadata: The PHA4GE SARS-CoV-2 contextual data specification package
- Author
-
Emma J Griffiths, Ruth E Timme, Catarina Inês Mendes, Andrew J Page, Nabil-Fareed Alikhan, Dan Fornika, Finlay Maguire, Josefina Campos, Daniel Park, Idowu B Olawoye, Paul E Oluniyi, Dominique Anderson, Alan Christoffels, Anders Gonçalves da Silva, Rhiannon Cameron, Damion Dooley, Lee S Katz, Allison Black, Ilene Karsch-Mizrachi, Tanya Barrett, Anjanette Johnston, Thomas R Connor, Samuel M Nicholls, Adam A Witney, Gregory H Tyson, Simon H Tausch, Amogelang R Raphenya, Brian Alcock, David M Aanensen, Emma Hodcroft, William W L Hsiao, Ana Tereza R Vasconcelos, and Duncan R MacCannell
- Subjects
Metadata ,SARS-CoV-2 ,COVID-19 ,Humans ,Reproducibility of Results ,Health Informatics ,Genomics ,Public Health ,Computer Science Applications - Abstract
Background The Public Health Alliance for Genomic Epidemiology (PHA4GE) (https://pha4ge.org) is a global coalition that is actively working to establish consensus standards, document and share best practices, improve the availability of critical bioinformatics tools and resources, and advocate for greater openness, interoperability, accessibility, and reproducibility in public health microbial bioinformatics. In the face of the current pandemic, PHA4GE has identified a need for a fit-for-purpose, open-source SARS-CoV-2 contextual data standard. Results As such, we have developed a SARS-CoV-2 contextual data specification package based on harmonizable, publicly available community standards. The specification can be implemented via a collection template, as well as an array of protocols and tools to support both the harmonization and submission of sequence data and contextual information to public biorepositories. Conclusions Well-structured, rich contextual data add value, promote reuse, and enable aggregation and integration of disparate datasets. Adoption of the proposed standard and practices will better enable interoperability between datasets and systems, improve the consistency and utility of generated data, and ultimately facilitate novel insights and discoveries in SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. The package is now supported by the NCBI’s BioSample database.
- Published
- 2022