ELIXIR-NLELIXIR-Netherlands

ELIXIR-NL is an infrastructure that develops and promotes uptake of data services and analytics tools for researchers from across the spectrum of biological and biomedical science, while fostering sustainability of core services and software. Towards this end, ELIXIR-EU has as well as users. The ELIXIR-NL infrastructure aims to bring any combination of diverse and distributed life science resources together in a form that will allow analytics and modelling workflows to leverage the increased information retrieved from truly interlinked data, workflows, and models. Owing to its numerous (inter)national connections, ELIXIR-NL is an essential enabler for digital life sciences (underpinning Open Science), thus supporting optimal translation into actual societal innovations.
(1) developed criteria for selection of Core Data Resources (CDRs), a process that has already resulted in increased national funding for such important data collections.
(2) set up ELIXIR user-communities, promoting the uptake of (taylored) ELIXIR services within specific (sub)disciplines.
(3) created the registry bio.tools of European bioinformatics tools and services that provides a comprehensive collection of software and databases, facilitating researchers to find, understand, utilise and cite the resources they need.
(4) adopted a strong FAIR implementation strategy and architecture for its services, actively driving the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability of data across European life sciences. As part of this initiative, Recommended Interoperability Resources have been developed, underlying the ELIXIR Interoperability FAIR Service Framework.
(5) created the ELIXIR Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure, which enables researchers to use their personal login to access data and services across the infrastructure. It also allows service-providers to control and manage access rights for specific user groups. (6) created the ELIXIR training platform TESS which facilitates browsing, discovering and organising life sciences training resources, aggregated from ELIXIR nodes and 3rd-party providers. TESS allows the creation of training workflows and links to resources contributed by training providers.
ELIXIR-NL has been a founding node within ELIXIR-EU and has contributed core elements of the wider infrastructure, most notably through the definition of the FAIR data principles (Wilkinson et al. 20166), initiated in DTL/ELIXIR-NL in 2014, which since then have become a global guideline for data management. The FAIR approach is central to many of ELIXIR-NL’s activities, and is the basis for active collaboration within Health-RI and the Personal Health Train and Farm Data Train initiatives.
ELIXIR is organised in five platforms: Data, Tools, Compute, Interoperability and Training, each with their own development programme. They also work closely together with the ELIXIR user-communities. ELIXIR-NL has a mirrored national structure, with initial priorities in the compute and storage infrastructure, data interoperability, and training & education and in several user communities (see below). ELIXIR-NL is currently expanding its activity in the Data and Tools platforms, by stocktaking and inviting significant national data repositories for prioritisation toward core data resources, and analytics tools/services for consolidation and inclusion in the ELIXIR-supported bio.tools registry. Together with partners, ELIXIR-NL works towards a core backbone for semantic and syntactic interoperability, which allows tools, compute platforms and data to work together seamlessly in variable, customisable combinations. Academic and industrial groups can both be contributors.