Open Data for Discovery Science

Philip R.O. Payne1, Kun Huang2, Nigam H. Shah3, Jessica Tenenbaum4


1Washington University Institute for Informatics, Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine
2Department of Biomedical Informatics, The Ohio State University College of Medicine
3Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, Stanford University
4Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Duke University
Email: prpayne@wustl.edu, kun.huang@osumc.edu, nigam@stanford.edu, jessie.tenenbaum@duke.edu

Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing 22:649-652(2017)

© 2017 World Scientific
Open Access chapter published by World Scientific Publishing Company and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 License.


Abstract

The modern healthcare and life sciences ecosystem is moving towards an increasingly open and data-centric approach to discovery science. This evolving paradigm is predicated on a complex set of information needs related to our collective ability to share, discover, reuse, integrate, and analyze open biological, clinical, and population level data resources of varying composition, granularity, and syntactic or semantic consistency. Such an evolution is further impacted by a concomitant growth in the size of data sets that can and should be employed for both hypothesis discovery and testing. When such open data can be accessed and employed for discovery purposes, a broad spectrum of high impact end-points is made possible. These span the spectrum from identification of de novo biomarker complexes that can inform precision medicine, to the repositioning or repurposing of extant agents for new and cost-effective therapies, to the assessment of population level influences on disease and wellness. Of note, these types of uses of open data can be either primary, wherein open data is the substantive basis for inquiry, or secondary, wherein open data is used to augment or enrich project-specific or proprietary data that is not open in and of itself. This workshop is concerned with the key challenges, opportunities, and methodological best practices whereby open data can be used to drive the advancement of discovery science in all of the aforementioned capacities.


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