Standards Development: Necessarily a Two-Way Street

Dr Chris Taylor

EMBL-EBI, Human Genome Campus, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, UK

In recent years great strides have been made toward the establishment of standards with which to capture and manage data generated by diverse bioscience workflows. Latterly, several projects have attempted to integrate such standards to better support systems biology. However, (or perhaps, as a result...) for 'non-involveds' the overall picture can be confusing, and motivations unclear. Equally, for 'involveds' there is a concern
that lack of input from the wider community will hinder development, and ultimately, uptake. Dialogue between standards developers and those they seek to support is therefore crucial if we are to have appropriate, useful standards with which to store, share and integrate data.