Building a successful international research community through data sharing: the case of wheat information system (WheatIS)

Authors: Sen, Taner; CACCAMO, MARIO - French National Institute For Agricultural Research; EDWARDS, DAVID - University Of Western Australia; QUESNEVILLE, HADI - French National Institute For Agricultural Research

Submitted to: F1000Research
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 3/11/2021
Publication Date: 6/5/2020
Citation: Sen, T.Z., Caccamo, M., Edwards, D., Quesneville, H. 2020. Building a successful international research community through data sharing: the case of wheat information system (WheatIS). F1000Research. 9. Article 536. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.23525.1.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.23525.1

Interpretive Summary: The International Wheat Information System (WheatIS) Expert Working Group (EWG) was initiated in 2012 under the Wheat Initiative (i) to define data standards and data exchange protocols, and (ii) to develop a framework to support an integrated Wheat Information System. Our aim is to provide the international wheat research community with an easy access to wheat genetic, phenotype, environmental information, and genomic information. A central node, called WheatIS core, provides a single entry point for researchers at http://www.wheatis.org. In this paper, we share the challenges, technical issues, when establishing an informational infrastructure and creating a single web portal.

Technical Abstract: The International Wheat Information System (WheatIS) Expert Working Group (EWG) was initiated in 2012 under the Wheat Initiative with a broad range of contributing organizations. The mission of the WheatIS EWG was to create an informational infrastructure, establish data standards, and build a single portal that allows search, retrieval, and display of globally distributed wheat data sets that are indexed in standard data formats at servers around the world. WheatIS.org was released publicly in 2015, and by 2020, it expanded to 8 geographically-distributed nodes and around 20 organizations under its umbrella. In this paper, we present our experience, the challenges we faced, and the answer we brought for establishing an international research community to build an informational infrastructure. Our hope is that our experience with building WheatIS.org will guide current and future research communities to facilitate institutional and international challenges to create global tools and resources to help their respective scientific communities.