GSC

From Genomic Standards Consortium

[edit] About the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC)

Homepage URL: http://gensc.org

Founded: Sept 2005

The Genomic Standards Consortium The GSC is an open-membership working body which formed in September 2005. The goal of this international community is to promote mechanisms that standardize the description of genomes and the exchange and integration of genomic data.

[edit] GSC Mission

Community-driven standards have the best chance of success if developed within the auspices of international working groups. Participants in the GSC include biologists, computer scientists, those building genomic databases and conducting large-scale comparative genomic analyses, and those with experience of building community-based standards. The mission of the GSC is to work with the wider community towards:

• the implementation of a new genomic standard
• methods of capturing and exchanging metadata
• harmonization of metadata collection and analysis efforts across the wider genomics community

The GSC is working towards “Minimum Information about a Genome Sequence” (MIGS) specification. MIGS provides an extension of the minimum information already captured by the primary nucleotide databases (DDBJ/EMBL/Genbank).

The development of any checklist must be an open and iterative process that involves a balanced group of participants. Further, this development process must be supported by providing mechanisms for achieving compliance if a checklist is to be adopted as a tool for the standardization of a particular area of knowledge. The GSC has implemented the MIGS checklist as a MIGS XML schema and is now further developed as Genomic Contextual Data Markup Lanuage GCDML and built a freely available Genome Catalogue system (GCat) using the GenCat software.

[edit] Related pages

GSC Membership, GSC Strategy, GSC Change Log, Contact us