Planning Project for EU infrastructure for bioinformatics. Goals: Co-ordinated data resources, integration & interoperability of data, links to data in other domains, open access to data, enhance euro competitiveness in bioscience, address need for increased funding and its co-ordination. - Cass Johnston

Reports from initial committee meetings (userbase consultation) due now - will define the scope & remit of ELIXIR. Then work on international agreement for goals, costs then look at how to fund. - Cass Johnston

Will provide: core and specialist data resources, compute centres, infrastructure for tools and services integration, support for Bio ESFRI projects, community support and training. - Cass Johnston

Survey of existing EU database resources. See Poster E41 for details - Cass Johnston

DB size / number of users / cost etc follow power law - many small dbs, few users, low cost. A few massive ones. Notably, 90% have no funding security beyond 3 years. So - ELIXIR needs to co-ordinate, prioritise and stabilise funding for these resources. - Cass Johnston

Databases relatively under control compared to other aspects: Standards and ontologies, Literature, Other domains (medical data, biodiversity data etc), Integration - Cass Johnston

Don't need to centralise standards devel, is fine for them to come out of communities, but do need to encourage and publicise standards. OBO. - Cass Johnston

Timeline. Dec 2010: end of preparatory phase. Dec 2016: end of construction phase. - Gabriele Sales

Literature: integrated, open access text-based literature resource would be good :) - Cass Johnston

Compute resources: Modularise organisation of dataresources. Build network of biocomp resources. Catalyst devel of web services and cloud computing. More program to data rather than other way round. Work with EU supercomputing centres. - Cass Johnston

Questinon: DB developers should have to abide by standards in order to publish / be funded by ELIXIR - Cass Johnston

Question: is ELIXIR taking into account collaborations with groups outside Europe? - Gabriele Sales

Question: differences between ELIXIR and national nodes - Gabriele Sales

May call for proposals for nodes from EU countries, although no actual funding and no mechanism for deciding which would be accepted yet so proposals a bit hypothetical. Something for people to ponder... - Cass Johnston

blog notes: http://www.cassj.co.uk/blog... - Cass Johnston