Sustainability & Support

 

Since the development of powerful, high-throughput technologies, together with globalization of scientific research, the biomedical research community has been presented with increasingly diverse and specialized data sets, many of which are extremely large and complex, leading to unprecedented challenges for the secure storage and easy retrieval of this substantial amount of information. The numerous data and biological material resources created scattered through an increasing number of knowledge domain specific databases and bioresources have consequently become an important tool in assisting scientists to understand and explain biological molecules and processes, in addition to their interactions and are of significant value to all scientists for the purposes of result validation, testing new hypotheses and developing new technologies/platforms [Collins, 2010]. Since biological knowledge is distributed worldwide and therefore among many differently specialized databases, preservation, consistency of information and data quality are essential while standardization of data representation and transfer is becoming more and more a prerequisite for enabling the integration of existing and new databases, a current European effort expended in developing modes of data integration and database interoperability [Smedley et al., 2008].

 

Underlying the organizational and technical challenges of database integration is that of database infrastructure funding [Chandras et al., 2009; Schofield et al., 2009; Schofield et al., 2010]. For databases to retain their value to the community they need to be sustained both financially and scientifically over time. A major problem for most databases is securing financial support for the bioinformaticians and curators who create and maintain them [Ellis and Kalumbi, 1999; Editorial, 2007]. Lack of secure funding may frequently result in database or biological resource decommissioning as well as loss of valuable and irreplaceable data. Following the close examination of setbacks that most of these biological resource centers today encounter and existing business models that they could potentially adopt in order to reinforce database sustainability, for biological resource centers to achieve long term maintenance Institutional and Government funds are the most reliable sources of funding [Chandras et al., 2009]. In all cases, funders should be aware of the need to support viable career paths for the software engineers and bioinformaticians who create the knowledge environments and curate the data in them. In order to obtain value for money, it will be vital for funding agencies to carefully select the databases they choose to support and then to support them for the long term. They must encourage the sustained availability of these data and build incentives for the development of cross-querying capability.

 

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