A Catalogue of Standards

The BioSharing catalogue aims to

1. centralize community-developed bioscience standards, linking to policies, other portals (e.g. 6,7,8), open access resources (e.g. 9,10) and lists of tools and databases implementing the standards (e.g. 11, 12);
2. develop and maintain a set of criteria for assessing the usability and popularity of the standards, also the interoperability and relations among them;
3. foster interoperability, addressing overlaps and duplication of efforts that hamper their wider uptake and interfere with the creation of standards-compliant systems.

The BioSharing catalogue classifies standards into three types:
– reporting requirements (minimal information checklists to report of the same core set of information)
– terminological artifacts (such as controlled vocabularies and ontologies to describe the information)
– exchange formats (to communicate the information)