Slide deck prepared by Suzanne Sansone to support breakout discussion during the Pistoia Alliance Information Ecosystem Workshop in October 2011

1. AM 5: The Standards Landscape (Susanna Sansone)
1 David Klatte
2 Ingrid Schmid
3 Jesus Del Valle
4 Parthiban Srinivasan
5 Paul Bradley
6 Peter Boogard
8. Joseph Donahue
9 Susanna Sansone
Types of standards
- Terminologies
- File format (combined with the terminology),
- Minimal requirements (also called referred to as ‘business rules’ when
contracting out a CROs certain defining what information/level of details are
expected back)
Standards as enablers:
- enterprise search, find info within an organization;
- data federation, link data across disparate resource;
- data entry/curation, identify and record unambiguously the information;
- data storage and reuse.
…etc…

2. Unhelpful wealth of ‘standards’
- A consequent mountain of technical frameworks needed to achieve data
interoperability; a laborious (and often ambiguous) cross-referencing/mapping
exercises;, done internally;
- Lots of time spent in “plumbing”;
- Gaps and overlaps in coverage; different methods, practices and protocols used
to build them.
E.g. Varity of tests’ results
- small molecules
- animal models
- clinical samples (CDISC is not sufficient)
- cell lines
- new types of data (e.g. omics)
- biological networks
=> received in a variety of formats from different sources, mapped to an ‘internal
standard’; but ideally those should be mapped to a set of common standards

3. Biological network space – example of domain:
- BioPax http://co.mbine.org/ (community-driven standards: format+ontology)
- BEL http://belframework.org (Selventa-driven in response to BioPax being too
cumbersome but also missing information/elements)
Potential roles for Pistoia
1. A common catalogue, with selected, rubber-stamped standards (extracted
from a raw lists, created collaboratively)
- to proactively monitor the changing standards landscape: monitor usability
(pragmatism), maturity, coverage
- to (ultimately) facilitate wide adoption, by pharmas, vendors, KM
providers and academia
2. Stimulating interactions (informed by 1)
- Proactive role for Pistoia (via WG? VSI extending its scope?)
- Identify low hanging fruits (e.g. BEL and BioPax)