The foundingGIDE Consortium

FoundingGIDE is a consortium that brings together Research Infrastructures, data repositories, community initiatives and individual researchers to build an ecosystem for image data sharing. The project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe program as a Coordination and Support Action.

Through the cooperation of European Research Infrastructures with those in Australia and Japan, the project aims to enable exchange of large and valuable bioimage data across the globe. Open access to such a resource will empower the global scientific community.

foundinggide partners map

Objectives

  1. Establish coordination among global open bioimage data resources
  2. Increase resource interoperability
  3. Engage with and provide guidance to community initiatives and end-users
  4. Plan for sustainability of developed solutions
  5. Build an ecosystem for new interlinked resources to grow

Partners

The foundingGIDE project brings European Research Infrastructure and image data resource owners together with their counterparts from Australia and Japan. Our aim is to develop common recommendations for ontologies and metadata, together with the wider global bioimage community, and promote adoption of these recommendations by researchers.

Euro BioImaging logo for foundingGIDE community event 2024
EMBL EBI logo for foundingGIDE community event 2024
CNR logo
German BioImaging Logo
global bioimaging logo
RIKEN logo
National Imaging Facility Australia logo
Microscopy Australia dark logo

Governance

The foundingGIDE consortium consists of:

foundingGIDE governance

Management Team

The Management Team comprises of the Work Package leads and Task leads, the Project Manager and Euro-BioImaging’s Head of Image Data Services as Chair. The team will monitor and assess the critical risks associated with the project and implement mitigation measures as required.

Steering Committee

The Steering Committee is the decision making body for the project and it consists of up to two representatives from each beneficiary with the Euro-BioImaging Director General as chair.

Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC)

The individuals on the SAC are nominated by the Management Team. They will be strategically selected to strengthen the global community and help drive the objectives of foundingGIDE. The decision to select a nominee to become a SAC member will be taken by the Steering Committee. The SAC will act as the advisory body for the execution of the project, oversee project progress and provide advisory support to the Steering Committee.

Structure

The work packages for the foundingGIDE project are clustered around four Themes which focus on specific challenges the project aims to facilitate.

The global coordination theme for data sharing among imaging infrastructures crucially underpins the FoundingGIDE project. Theme 1 covers the coordination of RI partners and strives to establish a strategy to work together. While targeting the global community, the project will cultivate connections to the European Research Area (ERA) and EOSC through EUROBIOIMAGING ERIC and the participating European data repositories. Key activities will include technical and community coordination events promoting regional developments on a global level.

Using conserved vocabularies and ontologies is an important step for sharing and querying image data. Rapidly developing, cross-domain, imaging technologies require a coordinated approach to ensure consistency in the field and across different image data repositories. Theme 2 will cover a landscape analysis of biological and preclinical imaging ontologies. Together with bioimaging domain experts, ontology developers, and data resource owners, recommendations will be made on a subset of ontologies to be implemented in the partner data resources. A strategy for maintenance of selected ontologies will be developed to ensure sustainability. Centralised coordination will foster commonalities between biological and preclinical imaging.

Ensuring image data compatibility across different resources involves integrating metadata effectively. While fully implementing a unified metadata schema exceeds this project’s scope, Theme 3 will establish a foundational set of common metadata sufficient to enable cross-resource search and discoverability. This common core will draw from key ontologies developed in Theme 2, existing resource schemas, and metadata schema like REMBI. These core metadata will support cross-resource search and discoverability in both biological and preclinical imaging, laying groundwork for broader alignment with the FoundingGIDE ecosystem.

FoundingGIDE’s metadata and ontology initiatives are foundational for a global image data ecosystem. Theme 4 will leverage Themes 1-3 to create proof-of-concept projects for metadata exchange between the BIA, IDR, SSBD, and AIS XNAT. A new data portal will allow cross-resource searches, enhancing open image data accessibility. These efforts, promoted via the EURO-BIOIMAGING Web Portal (EWP), will demonstrate the value of global coordination effort benefits and future possibilities.

Contact

foundingGIDE@eurobioimaging.eu

X @GIDEproject

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