• Chuck Cook

Introduction

• Niklas Blomberg, ELIXIR, United Kingdom

Introduction to ELIXIR, Europes distributed infrastructure for coordinating bioinformatics resources, and to Core Data Resources, which are of fundamental importance to the wider life sciences community.

• Christine Orengo, University College London, United Kingdom

The CATH domain structure family classification provides an evolutionary classification of nearly half a million known domain structures and more than 90 million structurally annotated domain sequences. Functional sub-classification of the ~6000 CATH superfamilies identifies ~60,000 functional families in which relatives share highly similar structures and functions and in which at least one relative has had their function experimentally characterized. Established more than 20 years ago, CATH is a partner resource in InterPro, Genome3D and PDBe-KB. CATH has received funding from MRC, BBSRC, Wellcome Trust, EU and NIH. Nevertheless, ensuring sustained, long-term funding is an ongoing challenge.

• Cathy Wu, University of Delaware, United States

UniProt freely provides a comprehensive overview of protein knowledge. The UniProt Consortium is an international collaboration between groups in the UK (European Bioinformatics Institute), Switzerland (Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics) and USA (Protein Information Resource), funded by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, the State Secretariat for Education and Innovation SERI, and the National Institutes of Health. One of the longest-running and most widely used reference resources of the life sciences community, UniProt provides lessons learned, while still facing funding challenges, for long-term sustainability as an international core data resource.

• Chuck Cook

• Rolf Apweiler

Life sciences data resources are critical for researchers worldwide, but funding for many resources is short-term. The global coalition of the world’s biomedical and life sciences research funders proposes to develop ways of coordinating support for the most essential data resources in a more strategic and sustainable way, so as to ensure their continued benefits for scientists, industry, and the broader community.

• Francis Ouellette, Genome Quebec, Canada

Insights into the challenges and aspiration of a successful coalition for the life science data resource.

• Niklas Blomberg, ELIXIR, United Kingdom

ELIXIR Core Data Resources are externally reviewed and selected on the basis of a set of 23 indicators in five categories, both qualitative and quantitative.

• Stephen Burley, RCSB PDB, UCSD, Rutgers University, United States

The Worldwide Protein Data Bank partnership, Including RCSB PDB (United States), PDBe (Europe), PDBj (Asia), and BMRB (United States, Asia), manages the global Protein Data Bank.wwPDB vision/mission, impact, operations, and challenges ahead will be discussed.

• Judy Blake

The Alliance of Genome Resources brings together core data resources of model organism databases and the Gene Ontology. Here the current status of the Alliance, including the work of the Alliance as part of the NIH Data Commons Pilot Phase project, will be presented. Accomplishments and challenges for creating a union of large successful data resources, and the key requirements for successful networking of data scientist communities, will be used to illustrate a future vision for core resource sustainability.