Dass, G. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2020

The Omics Discovery REST interface

The Omics Discovery Index is an open source platform that can be used to access, discover and disseminate omics datasets. OmicsDI integrates proteomics, genomics, metabolomics, models and transcriptomics datasets. Using an efficient indexing system, OmicsDI integrates different biological entities including genes, transcripts, proteins, metabolites and the corresponding publications from PubMed. In addition, it implements a group of pipelines to estimate the impact of each dataset by tracing the number of citations, reanalysis and biological entities reported by each dataset. Here, we present the OmicsDI REST interface to enable programmatic access to any dataset in OmicsDI or all the datasets for a specific provider (database). Clients can perform queries on the API using different metadata information such as sample details (species, tissues, etc), instrumentation (mass spectrometer, sequencer), keywords and other provided annotations. In addition, we present two different libraries in R and Python to facilitate the development of tools that can programmatically interact with the OmicsDI REST interface.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2018

Quantifying the impact of public omics data

The amount of omics data in the public domain is increasing every year [1, 2]. Public availability of datasets is growing in all disciplines, because it is considered to be a good scientific practice (e.g. to enable reproducibility), and/or it is mandated by funding agencies, scientific journals, etc. Science is now a data intensive discipline and therefore, new and innovative ways for data management, data sharing, and for discovering novel datasets are increasingly required [3, 4]. However, as data volumes grow, quantifying its impact becomes more and more important. In this context, the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles have been developed to promote good scientific practises for scientific data and data resources [5]. In fact, recently, several resources [1, 2, 6] have been created to facilitate the Findability (F) and Accessibility (A) of biomedical datasets. These principles put a specific emphasis on enhancing the ability of both individuals and software to discover and re-use digital objects in an automated fashion throughout their entire life cycle [5]. While data resources typically assign an equal relevance to all datasets (e.g. as results of a query), the usage patterns of the data can vary enormously, similarly to other \"research products\" such as publications. How do we know which datasets are getting more attention? More generally, how can we quantify the scientific impact of datasets?

bioinformatics↗