HARMONise: Enhancing interoperability of marine biomolecular (meta)data across Helmholtz Centres

Project Partners: AWI, GEOMAR

Biomolecular data, e.g. DNA and RNA sequences, provides insights into the structure and functioning of marine communities in space and time. The associated metadata has great internal diversity and complexity, and to date biomolecular (meta)data management is not well integrated and harmonised across environmentally focused Helmholtz Centers.

As part of the HMC Project HARMONise, we aim to develop sustainable solutions and digital cultures to enable high-quality, standards-compliant curation and management of marine biomolecular metadata at AWI and GEOMAR, to better embed biomolecular science into broader digital ecosystems and research domains. Our approach builds on a relational database that aligns metadata with community standards such as the Minimum Information about any (x) sequence (MIxS) supported by the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC), and with associated ontology content (e.g. The Environment Ontology - ENVO).

At the same time, we ensure the harmonization of metadata with existing Helmholtz repositories (e.g. PANGAEA). A web-portal for metadata upload and harvest will enable sustainable data stewardship and support researchers in delivering high-quality metadata to national and global repositories, and improve accessibility of the metadata.

Metadata subsets will be harvested by the Marine Data Portal (https://marine-data.de), increasing findability across research domains and promoting reuse of biomolecular research data. Alignment of the recorded metadata with community standards and relevant data exchange formats will support Helmholtz and global interoperability.