As a follow-up to the Fall 2021 Workshop on Prefixes, CURIEs, and IRIs, INDRA labs at Harvard Medical School hosted a 2022 edition of the workshop with a slightly shorter duration and a greater focus on community discussion and the following goals:

  1. Reflect on progress since last year’s workshop
  2. Showcase new tools, workflow, and philosophies
  3. Collect and describe current use cases and pain points related to prefixes, prefix maps, CURIEs, and IRIs in the biomedical domain
  4. Provide a discussion forum on key issues

Lightning Talks

Name Affiliation Title
Charles Tapley Hoyt Harvard Medical School, USA Introduction and State of the Bioregistry
Sierra Moxon Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, USA Prefix Management Applications in Biolink Model
Sanya Bathla Taneja University of Pittsburgh, USA Bioregistry in Knowledge Graph Assembly
Sebastian Lobentanzer University of Heidelberg, Germany Parsing and Validating CURIEs in BioCypher
Ian Fore National Institutes of Health, USA NIH, NCI, and GA4GH Use Cases
Tiffany J. Callahan Columbia University, USA Bioregistry Governance
Meghan Balk National Ecological Observatory Network, USA Bioregistry Review Team
Luca Cappelletti University of Milan, Italy GRAPE integration of Bioregistry

Summary of Main Discussion Points

Several participants prepared questions and discussion points on the Google Doc ahead of time. During the workshop, participants actively took notes and added additional points to the document. When the discussion forum of the workshop began, discussion centered around the following issues:

  • Expanding the scope of Bioregistry to cover other scientific domains (e.g., environmental biology, taxonomy)
  • As developers, maintainers, and users of tools like the Bioregistry, how do we prepare educational materials for potential users of our tools and, more generally, how do we educate normal scientists, funding bodies, and publishers of the importance of good semantics?
  • How to reconcile community- and project-specific variants of content from the Bioregistry (e.g., using the contexts feature)
  • Security concerns for meta-resolvers, such as person-in-the-middle attacks
  • Mirroring the base Bioregistry or making deployments with a custom subset or additional custom content
  • Improving the connection from Bioregistry to other registries and de-duplicating effort

Recording

Funding

Preparation for this workshop was funded by the DARPA Young Faculty Award W911NF2010255 (PI: Benjamin M. Gyori).