With the data-generative approaches that are increasingly common in modern life science research, it is vital that the data and metadata produced by these efforts can be shared and reused. The Grassroots Infrastructure project wraps up industry-standard software tools with a consistent API that can be federated on a number of levels. This means institutions and groups can deploy a simple lightweight virtual machine, expose local data, connect up any existing data services, and federate their instance of the Grassroots with others out-of-the-box.
The Grassroots Infrastructure uses a controlled vocabulary of JSON messages to communicate, so any server or client that can understand JSON can be used to access and connect to the platform. We provide infrastructure to ensure that the scientific data remains the important factor, and not the worry about how to build a system to expose your data.
The Grassroots Infrastructure has been developed to expose a number of important and powerful technologies that can benefit researchers and developers to realise their data management needs.
Existing services:
As well as providing services, the Grassroots infrastructure also has the ability to host data. Building upon iRODS as a data management solution, we have added a number of features such as a search service and a fully featured web interface, using mod_eirods_dav, for accessing the data and metadata. Currently it is used to host the Designing Future Wheat Data Portal.
Grassroots has traditionally been the result of an effort to produce an interoperable data sharing platform for the wheat community. Whilst Grassroots is by no means organism-specific, our main use cases come from the wheat community. We get most of our community feedback from plant researchers at the EI, JIC, Bristol University, and other UK institutions, as well as from various international wheat working groups such as the RDA Wheat Data Interoperability maintenance group and the Wheat Initiative Wheat Information System expert working group. The newly awarded cross-institute programme grant, Designing Future Wheat (DFW), is the first flagship project of its kind to bring the UK’s wheat researchers together to deliver new varieties relevant to the international stage, through the coordinated effort of biologists, breeders, and informaticians. As such, Grassroots is funded by the DFW programme, enabling us to build a platform that can meet the needs of not only this ambitious programme, but the wider UK and international wheat community that needs fast and openly-licenced unfettered access to the data and experimental information arising from DFW.
If you have used any of the services that Grassroots provides in your own research, we would very much appreciate that you let us know and cite us in any publications, as follows:
Bian. X, Tyrrell. S, Davey R.P. The Grassroots life science data infrastructure (2017). https://grassroots.tools
orcid.org/0000-0002-5589-7754