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Table 7 XGAP participating consortia

From: XGAP: a uniform and extensible data model and software platform for genotype and phenotype experiments

Consortium

Remit

CASIMIR

The collection and distribution of large volumes of complex data typical of functional genomics is carried out by an increasing number of disseminated databases of hugely variable scale and scope. Combined analysis of highly distributed datasets provides much of the power of the approach of functional genomics, but depends on databases' ability to exchange data with each other and on analytical tools with semantic and structural integrity. Agreement on the standards adopted by databases will inevitably be a matter of community consensus and to that end a recent coordination action funded by the European Commission, CASIMIR [70], is engaged in a community consultation on the nature of the technical and semantic standards needed. What has already become clear in use-case studies conducted so far is that whatever standards are adopted, they will inevitably remain dynamic and continue to develop, particularly as new data types are collected. Crucially, they should allow the open-ended development of analytical and data-mining software, while integration of efforts to agree such standards and develop new software is essential

GEN2PHEN

Currently available genotype-to-phenotype (G2P) databases are few and far between, have great diversity of design, and limited or no interoperability between them. This arrangement provides no convenient way to populate the databases, no easy way to exchange, compare or integrate their content, and absolutely no way to search the totality of gathered information. In this context, the European Commission has recently funded the GEN2PHEN project [55], which intends to significantly improve the database infrastructure available within Europe for the collation, storage, and analysis of human and model-organism G2P data. This will be achieved by first developing various cutting-edge solutions, and then deploying these in conjunction with proven concepts, so as to transform the current elementary G2P database reality into a powerful networked hierarchy of interlinked databases, tools and standards