One of the main objectives of NanoCommons is to promote the FAIR data principles, cross-project collaboration and data interoperability. This way, it will be possible to offer the nanosafety community with high quality data that can be combined to produce big datasets and be used in novel modelling, machine learning, deep learning and AI techniques. To achieve this, the data produced through academia, industry and regulatory bodies need to be properly curated, contain sufficient metadata and be semantically annotated so that it can be accessible and readable from both humans and machines, making it will be possible for the data to be queried and mined using appropriate interoperability systems.

The University of Birmingham (UoB) aims to achieve this by implementing data management processes covering the entire data lifecycle, but mainly by moving the data curation process to the data generators. UoB understands that capturing the data and metadata as they are produced, if possible, will save substantial time and resources, while resulting in higher quality datasets. Thus, UoB is offering services on experimental workflow planning, preparation of pre-annotated data curation templates and pre-existing data curation services. UoB is also offering to complement these services with the use of electronic laboratory notebooks (ELN) that can be accessed either online or installed locally.

UoB will work closely with the interested parties to semantically annotate raw, processed and/or published data using established ontologies, but focusing on the widely accepted eNanoMapper (eNM) ontology. UoB will work with Users to build the workflows needed to identify the appropriate ontological terms to link to their datasets and assist with the establishment and addition into ontologies of any missing terms or branch of terms fitting their data. In this way, UoB will help ensure the highest possible degree of data FAIRness and interoperability. For further information please contact Anastasios (Tassos) Papadiamantis.

Further Information