Functional Annotation of ANimal Genomes (FAANG) Project

— A coordinated international action to accelerate Genome to Phenome

Current Organisers:

1. Peter Harrison, EMBL-EBI, United Kingdom, peter@ebi.ac.uk
2. Annik Gmel, Agroscope, Switzerland, annik.gmel@agroscope.admin.ch
3. The FAANG Data Coordination Centre (Peter Harrison, Alexey Sokolov, Akshatha Nayak, Koosum Roochun), EMBL-EBI, United Kingdom, faang-dcc@ebi.ac.uk
4. [Future member to be appointed from outside of Europe]

Task Force priorities:

The objective of the FAANG Metadata, Ontologies and FAIR Data Sharing Task Force is to ensure FAANG datasets are richly described, comply with FAIR (Findable, Accessible Interoperable and Reusable) data principles and are shared openly through the FAANG Data Policy. The task force recommends, develops and reviews new metadata rulesets, ontology improvements, data sharing methodologies, the FAANG Data Policy and data dissemination and presentation methods. It recommends best practice and promotes open data sharing amongst the FAANG community.

The Task Force will review and recommend development to the FAANG Data Coordination Centre on the following key areas:

1. The FAANG metadata standards (https://data.faang.org/ruleset/samples).
2. The process and guidance documentation for FAANG validation and submissions.
3. The improvement of ontologies through the FAANG Ontology Improvement Tool (https://data.faang.org/ontology), including organising ontology focus workshops.
4. Track hub standardisation, submission and presentation for FAANG analysis results.
5. How FAIR is FAANG data and what could be improved?
6. Prepare FAANG for developments in single cell atlases, pangenomes and emerging technologies.
7. Phenotyping recording improvement across FAANG.
8. Management of Information Sharing. Recording of Nagoya and clearer recording of third party limitations on data/phenotyping data use and IP.*
9. Identify training requirements for the FAANG consortia.
10. Contribute to organised scientific dissemination to the whole community.

Initial planned activities:

• Organisation of periodic zoom calls to address Task Force key topics.
• Develop a whitepaper to state FAANGs position and promote to data providers the FAANG principles of sharing of FAANG data and phenotypes. Solutions for Nagoya or commercially sensitive datasets (preventing re-identification). Frame the problem to the community, even if we don’t have the full solution at present.
• Prepare to lead roundtable/workshop discussion at PAG FAANG Friday event to help identify further gaps in requirements and to promote best practices from the task force.
• Promote FAANG principles of open data sharing to wider community.
• Identify training requirements for the FAANG consortia.
• Position task force against frame of AG2PI and AgBioData.