Tools and Resources Development Fund
Application deadline: 17 September 2014, 4pm
From the summary:
Our Tools and Resources Development Fund (TRDF) aims to pump prime the next generation of tools, technologies and resources that will be required by bioscience researchers in scientific areas within our remit. It is anticipated that successful grants will not exceed £150k (£187k FEC) (ref 1) and a fast-track, light touch peer review process will operate to enable researchers to respond rapidly to emerging challenges and opportunities.
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Projects are expected to have a maximum value of £150k (ref 1). The duration of projects should be between 6 and 18 months, although community networks to develop standards could be supported for up to 3 years.
A number of different types of proposal are eligible for consideration.
- New approaches to the analysis, modelling and interpretation of research data in the biological sciences, including development of software tools and algorithms. Of particular interest will be proposals that address challenges arising from emerging new types of data and proposals that address known problems associated with data handling (e.g. next generation sequencing, high-throughput phenotyping, the extraction of data from challenging biological images, metagenomics).
- New frameworks for the curation, sharing, and re-use/re-purposing of research data in the biological sciences, including embedding data citation mechanisms (e.g. persistent identifiers for datasets within research workflows) and novel data management planning (DMP) implementations (e.g. integration of DMP tools within research workflows)
- Community approaches to the sharing of research data including the development of standards (this could include coordinating UK input into international standards development activities).
- Approaches designed to exploit the latest computational technology to further biological research; for example, to facilitate the use of cloud computing approaches or high performance computing architectures.
Projects may extend existing software resources; however, the call is designed to support novel tools and methods. Incremental improvement and maintenance of existing software that does not provide new functionality or significant performance improvements (e.g. by migration to an advanced computing environment) does not fall within the scope of the call.
Very timely since the UK announcement that OpenDocument Format (ODF) is among the open standards:
The standards set out the document file formats that are expected to be used across all government bodies. Government will begin using open formats that will ensure that citizens and people working in government can use the applications that best meet their needs when they are viewing or working on documents together. (Open document formats selected to meet user needs)
ODF as a format supports RDFa as metadata but lacks an implementation that makes full use of that capability.
Imagine biocuration that:
- Starts with authors writing a text and is delivered to
- Publishers, who can proof or augment the author’s biocuration
- Results are curated on on publication (not months or years later)
- Results are immediately available for collation with other results.
The only way to match the explosive growth of bioscience publications with equally explosive growth of bioscience curation, is to use tools the user already knows. Like word processing software.
Please pass this along and let me know of other grants or funding opportunities where adaptation of office standards or software could change the fundamentals of workflow.