Genomic Biodiversity Interest Group (GBWG)

GBWG operates as in interest group under both TDWG and the Genomics Standards Consortium (GSC) to foster discussion between the biodiversity and genomics communities.

Motivation and scope

Biodiversity genomics is a fast-growing field of study that describes biological variation in all its dimensions from the foundational DNA layer to organisms and ecosystems, phylogeny and function. Much of the data collected in such efforts currently has no consistent vocabulary implementation, standards representation, or implementation for dissemination and integration in the public domain. This group focuses on metadata about genomic and metagenomic samples and not the management of actual sequence data. It also facilitates discussion of use cases, forms task groups to produce specific deliverables, and communicates relevant advances in biodiversity genomics technologies, vocabularies, and standards to the wider community of genomics data managers.

Any TDWG working groups and task groups associated with genomics data will fall under this newly formed interest group as well as biodiversity-related task and interest groups from Genomics Standards Consortium (GSC).

Goals, outputs, and outcomes

Goals

• Identify and fill gaps in standards for sharing genomic data and the material samples used to derive them.
• Coordinate across other working groups and standards, e.g., Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN) data standards task force and GGBN data standard; GSC and Minimum Information for any (x) Sequence (MIxS); International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories (ISBER) and Sample PREanalytic Code (SPREC); Biospecimen Reporting for Improved Study Quality (BRISQ).
• Create a task group for contextualizing and handling workflows as well as data standards for environmental DNA samples
• Create a task group for high throughput next-generation sequencing library samples to come up with data standards like the GGBN Data Standard

Outputs and outcomes

• Additional gaps in genomic data uses defined, standards reviewed and ratified, standard data dictionaries updated, white papers published.
• Reduced redundancy across genomics standards working groups and associated standards, increased efficiency for addressing community needs and filling gaps.

Strategy

The interest group will work with other data aggregators and communities to identify gaps in the pipelines, best practices, and vocabularies for publishing genomic collections data and provide use cases on genomic collections data management.

A list of known gaps and use cases can be found in the GGBN wiki use case collection: https://wiki.ggbn.org/ggbn/Use_Case_Collection

Becoming involved

This group welcomes participation from interested parties with backgrounds in informatics, biodiversity, molecular collections, genetics, technical architecture, or taxonomy. We propose the organization point for this group to be the TDWG website. Prospective members should refer to the email of the conveners for more information.

The benefit of inclusion in this group is to be informed of, influence, and promote new technologies and standards having to do with genomic biodiversity collections, data and research. Members will explore new avenues for research for both biologists and informaticians, and garner the opportunities of working directly with a globally diverse set of participants.

Please subscribe to our open mailing list to be informed about upcoming meetings and news. We will post working activities in the issue area of Github.

Task groups

1. Please see the charter for the task group on Sustainable DarwinCore MIxS Interoperability. The work of this group is captured in dwc-mixs and discussion on the open mailing list.