Brooksbank Cath, Quackenbush John
EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
OMICS. 2006 Summer;10(2):94-9. doi: 10.1089/omi.2006.10.94.
Access to data is something that every molecular biologist takes for granted nowadays, but data alone is of little use unless it is made available in a useable form through the development and global uptake of data standards. The challenge of standards development has been taken up by grass-roots movements working within several different branches of the biomedical research community. Many of these initiatives are proving extremely successful; for example, the Gene Ontology, which provides a controlled vocabulary for describing the properties of gene products, the Microarray Gene Expression Data Society's standards for describing microarray experiments, and the emerging standards developed by the Proteomics Standards Initiative are gaining broad acceptance. Standards development now faces its greatest ever challenge--the integration of diverse data types to fulfill the goals of systems biology. Now is the time for the communities that are developing these standards, the funding bodies that have invested so heavily in high-throughput data generation, and the publishers of biomedical research papers to cooperate fully to make the goals of integrated data analysis a reality.
如今，获取数据对每位分子生物学家来说都是理所当然的事，但仅有数据用处不大，除非通过数据标准的制定和全球采用，将其以可用的形式呈现出来。生物医学研究界几个不同分支中的基层运动已经着手应对制定标准这一挑战。其中许多举措都极为成功；例如，基因本体论为描述基因产物的特性提供了一个受控词汇表，微阵列基因表达数据协会描述微阵列实验的标准，以及蛋白质组学标准倡议组织制定的新兴标准都正获得广泛认可。标准制定目前面临着有史以来最大的挑战——整合各种数据类型以实现系统生物学的目标。现在是时候让制定这些标准的团体、在高通量数据生成方面投入巨资的资助机构以及生物医学研究论文的出版商充分合作，以使综合数据分析的目标成为现实。
