ELIXIR Portugal - for BOD17.pdf

We provide an update on the implementation of the ELIXIR infrastructure and in particular <br>in its Portuguese Node (​ http://elixir-portugal.org​ ). ELIXIR is organized into five <br>platforms that support the bioinformatics community across Europe<br>(​ http://elixir-europe.org/platforms​ ): Tools, Data, Compute, Interoperability and Training.<br>Additionally four use cases are currently supported by those platforms (​ http://www.elixir-europe.org/use-cases​ ): Human data, Rare diseases, Marine Metagenomics and Plant Sciences.<br>The Portuguese Node contributes actively to three of ELIXIR’s platforms (Tools, Interoperability and Training) and two of its use cases (Plant Sciences and Marine Metagenomics). The Portuguese Node service delivery plan for 2017, includes six initial services (​ http://elixir-portugal.org/nodeservices​ ): Computing Services, CorkOakDB, YEASTRACT, Plant sRNA Portal, Plant Experimental Assay Ontology (PEAO) and the Gulbenkian Training Programme in BioInformatics. The service delivery plan is to be updated periodically to include those services that are deemed relevant to the BioInformatics community. The Portuguese Node of ELIXIR is deployed on a cloud computing infrastructure provided by the INCD (Infraestrutura Nacional de Computação Distribuída), as well as commercial cloud services providers.<br>One of the active developments is implementing a Breeding API (BrAPI, https://github.com/plantbreeding/API ) endpoint. The BrAPI is a RESTful API that provides a standard programmatic access to data from a plant phenotyping and genotyping databases in  a language agnostic way. BrAPI is an open source project that can be joined by anyone allowing<br>data providers to improve calls that will enhance their data supply. Our endpoint implementation is intended to support access to the Portuguese community’s curated datasets in the woody plants domain.<br>In addition to describing the current development status, we will discuss strategies to incorporate new services and extend the services offered to the Portuguese Bioinformatics community.<br