The Plant Sciences Community has already implemented some critical elements of its roadmap, but needs some funding to coordinate the next steps.
The first point is about disseminating ELIXIR results through reusable training material and service bundles. The target audience will be biologists, agronomists and bioinformaticians involved in data production and analysis.
The second point is about improving data findability. We propose to specify a European one-stop portal giving access to plant data and tools in collaboration with the data platform. It will leverage existing ELIXIR resources: aggregation databases dedicated to plants (FAIDARE, Ensembl Plant, InterMine) and tools and standards collections (FAIRsharing, bio.tools).
Last, the gathering and formatting of data and metadata increasingly relies on community driven toolboxes such as FAIRDOM/Seek, COPO and ISA-Tools. There is an opportunity to improve their interoperability through aligned validation profiles and API use, hence easing submission to ELIXIR Databases.