Flemish Government

This grant aims at collaboration between a number of research infrastructures in Flanders. The ESFRIs in scope are LifeWatch, DiSSCo and ICOS (Environment cluster), and ELIXIR, AnaEE, Euro-BioImaging, EMBRC and Instruct (Health and Food cluster). The project is led by VIB (ELIXIR) and VLIZ (LifeWatch).    

Goal of the study is to survey the Flemish life-sciences research landscape to find synergies, broker collaborations and facilitate access to resources in the areas of data management and data analysis. This will allow to build expertise and knowledge across ESFRIs, expedite adoption of the VSC cloud resources by other scientific domains and allow ESFRIs to provide services to their communities within the context of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

With this grant, awarded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), we have the ambitious goal of building a truly integrated community of bioinformatics infrastructure. Therefore, we focus on collaboration with national (e.g. dmponline.be, VSC) and international (ELIXIR Communities, Galaxy, FAIRDOM, …) consortia and initiatives.

More specifically, we will be active in the field of data management, data analysis platforms, Node Services and training. We will lay the foundations to become the expertise centre for life-sciences Research Data Management. Building on internationally developed tools, such as DMPonline and FAIRDOM, we will provide practical solutions for Flemish researchers to make their data more FAIR. In collaboration with the Flemish Supercomputer Center (VSC), we will provide access to data analysis platforms (e.g. Galaxy and container based systems) to empower all life-science researchers, regardless of their technical computer science knowledge.

Building on the tools and resources developed by our partners -  the Node Services, we will further extend their functionality and compatibility. This will facilitate the integration of these services with other relevant ELIXIR resources and services, and provide a close connection with the user base ensuring relevant developments for the researchers.

With our training platform, we will catalyse and support the (self-) training of researchers (Dodona), set the scene for more intensive international collaborations, and increase the impact of ELIXIR Belgium services.

This grant, awarded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and the Department of Economy, Science and Innovation of the Flemish government (EWI), allows to expand the activities of the Belgian ELIXIR node. The current ELIXIR Belgium node services will be further developed to integrate them better into the ELIXIR network and allow compatibility with cloud based technologies. New projects of ELIXIR Belgium partners will be supported in order to increase the quality and visibility of these resources. Giving the increasing importance of cloud technology, initiatives will be taken to establish a plan for a Flemish cloud infrastructure. Trainings and workshops focussed on data and resources will be organised.

The aim of this grant, provided by the Department of Economy, Science and Innovation of the Flemish government (EWI), is to start building the Belgian ELIXIR node. This will be achieved by the establishment of the collaboration agreement between the ELIXIR partners and with the ELIXIR Hub, the development of an ELIXIR Belgium website, the organisation of a kick-off meeting to officially present ELIXIR Belgium, the organisation of focussed meetings to bring together specific communities or expertise and by supporting the integration of more research groups into ELIXIR.