USE CASE - PlutoF

Need:

PlutoF addresses the need for curating sequence source metadata in public sequence databases (INSDC), reduces the amount of missing or incorrect data in these databases, and provides a transparent record history of annotations.

Added Value:

Third-party curation service offers the possibility for improving public sequence data and their source metadata in a uniform way, ensuring that researchers can work with more reliable, extensive, and standardised metadata.

Competitive Advantage:

While there might be other local data curating solutions, through operating the ELIXIR CDCH our service pushes third-party annotations back to primary repositories for public use.

A qualitative upgrade on the current use of biodiversity data:

By offering an easy-to-use online front-end for working with the data, PlutoF motivates its users to publish their data annotations, therefore making available a large amount of correcting and improving data that would otherwise be hidden in article supplementary files or as notes in users’ work files.

Exemplary Use of the Service:

Users can add third-party annotations to add the missing locality info for sequences published in a specific scientific article where the collecting locations are present in the article but not uploaded to INSDC together with sequence data. Another example would be re-identifying incorrectly identified sequences, e.g. when through BLAST searches it appears that a fungal ITS sequence was identified as coming from plant in INSDC.

Competencies and Skills that are needed to use the Service:

Users should have a basic understanding of biodiversity and molecular data and the vocabulary used in describing these data.

Challenges for the Users:

Users may face a learning curve in familiarising themselves with the data management system PlutoF and its functionalities.

Users Role in the Service Development

We encourage users to provide feedback and suggestions to continually refine and enhance the curation service.