The following are a list of past initiatives APBioNet has championed. If you would like more information, please contact us.

 

AuthorID (AID)

The AuthorID (AID) was a novel way to combat author ambiguity by creating a central registrar of author identifiers and their works using the Domain Name System (DNS) resource records as a compact, non-database, yet efficient means of storage and retrieval of these records. The number of fields was almost limitless hence allowing every possible means of identifying an author to be captured. Therefor authors with multiple author identifiers issued by various publishers (e.g. Scopus author ID, ResearcherID) could now be resolved to a unique individual through identifier cross-referencing.

 

MiABI/DocID

Many databases which have been previously published are sustained for a few years, and when funds run dry or the principal investigator leaves, the data is not maintained and typically shutdown, never to be recoverable.

The APBioNet Minimum Information about a Bioinformatics Investigation (MIABI) required every author who publishes papers with regard to a database, to save an image in archives which can be reinstantiated on demand for inspection and verification. This promoted database longevity and minimised data loss.

DocID represents a central portal for these archives, assigning a unique id for each image and allows for users to:

  • download cloud-reinstantiable images of supported operating systems that we maintain, which users can build a version of their database in fully operational and reinstantiable form
  • upload a delta of their data which can be reinstantiated with a cloud image OS for archival
  • reinstantiate any such archived databases on demand and use the original database and all (or partially) supported features for a limited period.

In this way,  the hope was to be able to reduce the rate of data loss in the bioinformatics community and  promote database longevity (if possible, perpetuity) and reproducibility of bioinformatics research.

 

BioDB 100

APBioNet’s BioDB100 initiative, was to build 100 standards-compliant, interoperable bioinformatics databases as exemplars of reproducibility and standards conformance as described in MiABI/DocID

 

BioSLAX

BioSLAX  was a ‘live’ CD/DVD/USB  suite of bioinformatics tools that was released by the resource team of the BioInformatics Center (BIC), National University of Singapore (NUS), created by Chief Engineer Mark De Silva. Bootable from any PC, this a highly portable media bootable compressed Linux operating system with over 300 bioinformatics tools suitable for both research and learning and was used extensively to conduct training courses under the umbrella of APBioNET. It was also used to set up the Bioinformatics Resource Node of Vietnam at Bio-IBT, the Bioinformatics Resource Server of the Institute of Biotechnology, Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology. Utilizing BioSLAX on the the Xenserver hypervisors with a self written middle ware, the team were also able to create an automated on-demand instantiable database/application repository for APBioNet called “BioDB 100“ allowing researchers to archive their works as reinstantiable modules for BioSLAX and depositing these modules in a central repository.

BioSLAX was based off the popular SLAX live operating system created by Tomas Matejicek. More details about BioSLAX are available here.