[OpenTox] Developing architectures and specifications

[Barry Hardy]

As presented at the OpenTox meeting in Mainz this week, I summarised a 
few points including slides on the development of the ToxBank 
architecture and its relationship to Open Standards and best practices 
e.g., on the inclusion of well described protocols:
http://barryhardy.blogs.com/theferryman/2013/10/building-a-data-and-analysis-architecture-based-on-open-standards.html

We have been using ISA-Tab within ToxBank for the description of methods 
and metadata associated with datasets. Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran from 
the University of Oxford described developments on the ISA-Tab project at:
http://www.slideshare.net/agbeltran/opentox-europe-2013

Egon Willighagen from Maastricht University described the Open PHACTS 
project:
http://www.slideshare.net/egonw/the-open-phacts-concept-triple-store

As there is considerable overlap in thinking and approaches pursued 
within Open PHACTS and OpenTox, I think it could be a fruitful 
interaction area for interoperability advances supporting safety 
assessment use cases.

I pick up on one point that Egon mentioned that we need to support Open 
Specifications not unchanging Open Standards and it is a good point for 
OpenTox to keep in mind - we can work on developing and experimenting 
with emerging specifications before they have reached a point of 
standardisation. This is in fact the case with the OpenTox APIs with 
developers trying new application development out and discovering issues 
as discussed at the technical meeting. An agreement was reached to take 
the next 6 months to distill proposals into an updated OpenTox API for 
end of March 2014 leaving a good bit of time for further experimentation 
and discussion.

Barry