Gungahlin Homestead, Canberra, April 22 – 23, 2010

Overview

Phenomics is an emergent discipline that is poised to benefit enormously from significant technological developments in high throughput and high resolution sequencing, imaging and measurement platforms. Just as rapid change has impacted upon genomics, the biological community’s ability to assess an organism’s phenotype is now undergoing a major step change. An organism's phenome is its complete collection of observable and quantifiable traits (phenotypes), and is considered the product of a combination of the organism's genome, its development stage, disease conditions and its environment. Phenomics is thus the science of measuring and analysing an organism's phenome to better understand these influences. Under NCRIS 5.2: Integrated Biological Sciences the Australian federal government has funded two major Phenomics initiatives: The Australian Plant Phenomics Facility (APPF), specialising in phenotyping of crop and model plant species; and the Australian Phenomics Network (APN), which specialises in the phenotyping of mouse models. The data management and informatics needs of these facilities are significant and complex. Both facilities have common requirements to gather, manage, annotate, analyse and re-distribute data from high throughput phenotyping devices. To achieve these goals the facilities seek to utilise modern metadata repositories and semantic web technologies to support the knowledge management and discovery process. There is also the requirement to integrate the heterogeneous data sets into wider data resources such as the Atlas of Living Australia and the Australian Data Commons as well as providing interfaces to international biological data resources such as The Arabidopsis Information Resource and the Mouse Genome Initiative. The motivation for this workshop is the realisation that data management and informatics for phenomics within Australia is a largely uncharted space, particularly when compared to genomics, and that discussions need to be instigated and maintained between the research and eResearch and informatics communities to identify challenges and explore opportunities in what is seen as a growing research sector. The workshop also seeks to explore issues beyond the current needs of the phenotyping community and look to the future of integrative biology, where the relationship between the genome and the phenome can be explored and mapped in detail.

Goals

The workshop would seek to bring together the researchers who produce and explore the data with the technologists and informaticists who can advance and support these activities. The general objectives of the workshop are:

• For the phenomics community to articulate their activities and consequent needs, challenges and opportunities to the eResearch and informatics communities;
• For the eResearch and informatics communities to articulate their skills and capabilities to the phenomics community;
• To facilitate discussion between the communities to discover ways to bridge between the phenomics needs and the eResearch/informatics capabilities; and
• To explore opportunities in infrastructure establishment, research programs and collaborations.