FAIR BioHeaders

FAIR BioHeaders

Promoting the adoption of FAIR
principles to enhance the
accessibility and interoperability
of biological data headers.

FAIR BioHeaders

FAIR BioHeaders

Welcome to FAIR BioHeaders! Our mission is to facilitate the transfer of provenance and metadata from external sources to or near genome assembly in a way that is minimally disruptive to existing bioinformatics workflows. We are committed to enabling the FAIR principles and reducing the risk of genome data and metadata divergence.

About FAIR BioHeaders

FAIR BioHeaders (FHR) is designed with ease of implementation and backward compatibility in mind. Our goal is to provide users with the necessary metadata needed to replicate an analysis performed with a reference genome while keeping the metadata close to the data. By supporting a variety of text representations and enabling FAIR and TRUST principles, FHR ensures that data standards are beneficial to scientists and other stakeholders.

Key Features

  • Minimal Disruption: FHR uses FASTA comments and keeps included metadata to a minimum to minimize disruption to existing workflows.
  • Python Processing Library: FHR provides a Python processing library for easy integration into bioinformatics pipelines.
  • Alternative Data Serialization: FHR supports a variety of text representations to meet diverse needs.
  • JSON-Schema Validation: FHR relies on JSON-schema for schema validation, ensuring data integrity.
  • Ease of Use: With a small codebase and few dependencies, FHR is designed for ease of use and maintenance.

Adoption Challenges

While FHR offers significant benefits, adoption may present challenges, including the need for software packages to support FHR headers. We are actively working with the bioinformatics community to address these challenges and foster widespread adoption.

Community Adoption

FAIR BioHeaders has already been adopted by several significant biological curation efforts, including:

  • USDA ARS Pecan Germplasm Phenotype Database: Incorporating FHR-compliant reference genomes into its phenotype database.
  • Alliance of Genome Resources: Creating FHR YAML files for use within their genome browser instances.
  • AgBioData: Working on adopting FHR headers for genomic, genetic, and breeding data.
  • MicroPublications: Guiding authors in adopting FHR headers for proper reporting of genome metadata standards.

Get Involved

Join us in our mission to promote FAIR and TRUST principles in genomics! Whether you’re a researcher, developer, or data steward, there are many ways to contribute to the FAIR BioHeaders project. Get started by exploring our GitHub repositories and documentation.