Quantitative data: learning to share

"Whatever resources are used to bring data together [many of which are reviewed in this article], there is a growing assumption among researchers that data and computing resources should be readily reused, repurposed and extended by other scientists. “There are a lot of programs that come out every week in bioinformatics,” says Avi Ma'ayan, a systems biologist at Mount Sinai Hospital. “I can't think of one that is actually taking over —but a common theme is that you can attach pieces to it.” In fact, the fastest way to make data more useful for more purposes may lie in “ad hoc development,” in which applicable tools are identified and strung together as needed, says Sarah Killcoyne, who is project manager for research informatics at the ISB. “No one can build one system and hope it works,” she says. “In the life sciences, we have gotten a lot better at sharing.” "