This week, the European Bioinformatics Institute launched the Coordination of Standard in Metabolomics, or COSMOS, initiative, which is intended to create and establish standards for sharing metabolomics data.
The project, which will be coordinated by Christoph Steinbeck, a team leader in EBI’s cheminformatics and metabolism group, is financed by a €2 million ($2.6 million) grant from the European Commission's Seventh Framework Program, EBI said.
Specifically, the initiative will bring together European data providers to develop policies that ensure that metabolomics data is encoded in open standards; tagged with agreed metadata; supported by open source data management and capturing tools; disseminated in open-access databases; supported by vendors and publishers; and properly interfaced with data in other biomedical and life science e-infrastructures, EBI said.
EBI is involved in a number of ongoing standardization efforts including the Minimum Information about a Bioactive Entity, MIABE, standard (BI 9/2/2011); and the European Life-Science Infrastructure for Biological Information, or ELIXIR, project (BI 9/16/2011).