SciLifeLab Data Platform
The ambition of the SciLifeLab Data Platform is to provide researchers with data-related services allowing groundbreaking research that would otherwise not be developed or available. The SciLifeLab Data Platform is a technical environment for data-driven life science, bringing together data flowing from the infrastructure and international repositories to users in the Swedish life science community, in particular the new DDLS program.
About the SciLifeLab Data Platform
The SciLifeLab Data Platform is a component of the Data-Driven Life Science program that will be built and operated by the SciLifeLab Data Centre and partners. The scope and purpose of the platform has been set by the DDLS steering group to meet the requirements set out in the program donation letter. The ambition of the platform is to enable data driven life science research to happen at a national scale in Sweden and at the highest international scientific and technical level.
The SciLifeLab Data platform will operate as a nationally coordinated network of resources supporting DDLS research, including a large scale central data hub and connections to major Swedish e-infrastructures. It will support the development and hosting of unique computational tools and databases for life science research in Sweden, including compute-intensive software and large-volume datasets. The content of the platform will be largely community driven, but services will be developed and maintained by SciLifeLab in collaboration with various universities, research infrastructures, and researcher communities across Sweden. Where possible, the services will be also be connected with large international toolsets and databases such as those provided by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). In addition, data management guidelines as well as hands-on support with data publishing according to the FAIR principles will be offered. In particular, it will provide links to the Artificial Intelligence research area, the WASP and WASP-HS programs, and the Berzelius system with high capability for AI driven computational biology.
DDLS Data Science Nodes
In the end of May 2022, the SciLifeLab board appointed four national Data Science Nodes (DSNs) as part of the DDLS initiative. The four nodes, one for each DDLS research area, will coordinate and develop national services for databases and data support as well as bioinformatics support to the Swedish research community.
DDLS Data Science Nodes recruitment
All Data Science Nodes and Data Platform staff will be recruited to the participating organizations, enabling them to interact closely with local research and technology environments
Research communities served by the SciLifeLab Data Platform
The SciLifeLab Data platform will support organized user communities in each strategic area of the Data-Driven Life Science program (cell and molecular biology, evolution and biodiversity, precision medicine, and diagnostics, epidemiology and infection biology) and provide solutions that cross different scientific areas but are based on same technologies or data types. One of the goals of the SciLifeLab Data Platform will be to take advantage of the common handling of data from various scientific disciplines within the platform in order to make connections across disciplines in terms of their technological needs and scientific potential that are not obvious or easy to make.
Open science and FAIR
Open science values will be at the core of the SciLifeLab Data Platform. Each tool integrated in the platform will be developed as open-source software where community input will steer the developed functionality and direct community contributions will be welcome at any stage. Data hosted on the platform should meet the FAIR criteria, as open as possible, as closed as necessary when needed due to privacy, legal, and ethical concerns. To facilitate working with large volumes of data and machine-accessibility, programmatic access though an Application Programming Interface to each service will be developed.