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An intorduction to the Asian Bioinformation Center (ABC)

Ueng-Cheng Yang

Co-chair, ABC task force

Vice-president, APBioNet

INCoB 2009, Sept. 10, 2009

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ABC is established in the personal genomics workshop on Apr. 4, 2009

Representatives from Australia, China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan have

signed the Seoul resolution in the past.

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Hypothesis needs to be testable; prediction needs to be verified

Bioinformatician needs to work closely with wet lab. researchers

Motivation

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The European experience

• European molecular biology organization (EMBO)

• European molecular biology laboratory (EMBL)

• European molecular biology network (EMBNet)

• European Bioinformatics Instittue (EBI)

• Asia-Pacific International Molecular Biology Network (A-IMBN)

• electronic International Molecular Biology Laboratory (eIMBL)

• APBioNet

• Virtual Asian Bioinformation Center (ABC) => ABI (?)

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Endorsement to the Seoul resolution is still open.

1. establishing a strategic plan for participating institutions and economies in Asia;2. creating synergy that will make the Asian region stronger in bioinformation, bioinformatics and computational biology;

…6. aim to form Asian Bioinformation Centers throughout our region, and that will ultimately lead to the formation of a physical international institute for Asian Bioinformation.

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Identify ABC’s uniqueness

What’s the point of adding one more bioinformatics web site, which is not as resourceful as the major sites?

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Good science needs …

Reproducibility

Verifiability

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MIABi

Minimal information about a bioinformatics investigation

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To implement MIABi

Author ID

Data Repository

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Author Id1. Uniqueness of ID, deduplication an

d Synonymic/Multirole equivalence

2. Publisher/Editor/Reviewer/ Contributor/ Author Identity differentiation and disambiguation (not to be confused with other authors)

3. Prevention of identity theft (other person cannot claim credit for your work)

4. Non-repudiability (person cannot deny he didn't publish or make certain claims)

5. Accountability (person remains responsible for what he published, reviewer and claimed)

6. Traceabilty/Reachability (can find the person and track him down)

7. Security (no hacking, no unauthorised access, interception, cache poisoning)

8. Confidentiality of information (strong authentication - what you know, what you possess, what you are ; encryption)

9. Operational scaleability 10. Operational sustainabiity (business

model) 11. Operationally high availability 12. Universal accessibility (pay or free) 13. Provenance (for audit trail) 14. Interoperability and 15. Standards Version control, change

management and backward compatibility

16. Multilingual Support 17. Obsolescence management for indi

viduals who change names, getting married or using aliases

18. Authentication and authority19. Verification

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Bio-mirror 2 will add data repository for the MIABi initiative

12 nodes:

AustraliaAustriaChinaJapanKoreaMalaysiaNew ZealandPhilippines SingaporeTaiwanThailandUSA

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Summary: project list of ABC• Managed by ABC Task Force• Formation of ABC Tech Comm• Project 001 phase 1: Establish ABC website• Project 001 Phase 2: Establish xx.abcenter.org in six countries, Austral

ia (au), China (cn), Japan (jp), Korea (kr), Singapore (sg), Taiwan (tw)• Draft for Minimal Information About Bioinformatics Investigation (M

IABi)• AuthorID registry system started in sg, ready for registration and repli

cation throughout ABCs• ABC Repository Initiative in preparation for BioMirror2 • Research projects in negotiation

– Flu databases – AIDB– Personal genome project– Information security project– Workflow integration across Asia

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Events list of ABC

• Apr. 3-4: Personal genomics workshop in Seoul, Korea => Seoul resolution

• July 23: APAN meeting in Kuala Lumpur and the 2nd meeting, Malaysia => ABC technical meeting

• Sept. 10: InCoB and the 3rd ABC meeting in Singapore => Singapore resolution (?)

• Oct. 28: A-IMBN and the 4th ABC meeting, ABC session in Penang, Malaysia => promote ABC resource to biologists

• Mar. or Apr.: the 5th ABC meeting in Taipei, Taiwan

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Discussion

The Singapore resolution