1st “Exploratory” Genomics Standards Consortium Workshop

Date: 7-9 September, 2005

Venue: National Institute for Environmental e-Science, Cambridge, UK

Organizers: Dawn Field and Tatiana Tatusova

This exploratory workshop was organized by Dawn Field and Tatiana Tatusova to discuss the need for a new genomic standard. The invited speakers were brought together to help achieve three major goals at the workshop, namely, to identify the science questions driving the need for more metadata, to look for ways to harmonize existing and future efforts at metadata capture, and to develop a more detailed vision of the shape a new standard might take. More specifically, it was hoped that the group would use this opportunity to discuss features for inclusion in the draft checklist, discuss potential mechanisms for capturing and exchanging metadata, and discuss how the community might organize itself to make such a standard a reality. By the end of the meeting, consensus was reached that such a standard should evolve and this group accepted responsibility for doing so. As a result of this workshop, the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) was formally established.

Many thanks to NIEeS for funding and hosting the event and to the participants for talks and discussions.

Program outline

Speaker’s name	Title of presentation
Dawn Field	Welcome, background and goals of workshop
Stuart Ballard	Introduction to The National Institute for Environmental E-Science
Lita Procter	GBMF Marine Microbial Genome Sequencing Project Status
Robert Feldman	The promise of Metagenomics
Tatiana Tatusov	NCBI’s Genome Pojects Database
Victor Markowitz	The Integrated Microbial Community Genome (IMcG) Data Management Project
Jeremy Selengut	The Genome Properties project
Natalia Maltsev	From genomes to Phenotypes: PUMA2 a system for high-throughput evolutionary analysis of Metabolism
Dawn Field	The GenomeMine: The need for improved genomic metadata capture and exchange
Jessie Kennedy	The Taxonomic Concept
Norman Morrison	MIAME / Env
Matt Kane	Planning for Data Management Infrastructure Needs in Genome-Enabled Environmental Microbiology Research