The provision of tools and services for the life sciences is highly distributed. There are very many providers ranging from large entities including service organizations well geared for software development, to individual scientists with limited technical expertise and resources.
There is often little coordination of the scientific scope, description, use or interoperability of the software. The picture is extremely fragmented and in many cases scientists must trawl the Web
in their search for adequate tools, or rely on the advice of colleagues to comprehend the diverse offerings.
Thus, the creation of a comprehensive, consistent and searchable registry should have a major positive effect on tool utilization by the life sciences community. The current work on creation of such a registry is the principal contribution of the Danish Node to ELIXIR as well as a contribution of ELIXIR as such to the BioMedBridges joint effort on the ESFRI roadmap.
The study is now complete, this work was picked up in a subsequent study.