Hi everyone,

The NIH currently has an RFI on making big data usable: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-ES-15-002.html.

"The NIH is interested in exploring how the BD2K initiative can contribute to the improvement of policies, governance, administrative procedures, and funding to support community-based standards (CBS) efforts to develop and/or extend data and/or metadata standards, and how these activities relate to other ongoing or nascent biomedical research activities. Within this context, ‘community’ encompasses a broad range of stakeholders who may be engaged in the process of data standards development and use, including technical developers, librarians, science domain experts, researchers, information scientists, vendors, funders, publishers, and other end users. - See more at: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-ES-15-002.html#sthash.SP... "

I know most of us do NSF, not NIH funded research, but I think that the work we do on biodiversity informatics has a lot of relevance to NIH research (particularly documentation of microbial biodiversity), and the lessons learned about community by TDWG are worth sharing and promoting.

I was planning to draft a response from the point of view of the biodiversity ontology development, but we could also make it a larger biodiversity informatics response, and include all of TDWG. Alternatively, there could be one response from TDWG and one from the BCO/PCO groups, if someone is interested in taking the lead on a TDWG response.

Ramona ------------------------------------------------------ Ramona L. Walls, Ph.D. Scientific Analyst, The iPlant Collaborative, University of Arizona Research Associate, Bio5 Institute, University of Arizona Laboratory Research Associate, New York Botanical Garden