Leading sessions and launching tools: a packed schedule of upcoming events
The final quarter is always a busy time of year for conferences in our sector, but the activities surrounding International Data Week (IDW) 2025 in Brisbane this October have really raised the bar! The BioCommons team is leveraging the opportunity to share, learn and collaborate across a multitude of different events.
IDW takes place every two years and is hosted for the first time in Australia by Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). Jointly organised by the International Science Council’s Committee on Data (CODATA) and World Data System (WDS), and the Research Data Alliance (RDA), IDW will combine the Research Data Alliance Plenary Meeting with SciDataCon.
The RDA Plenary Meeting is a biannual meeting of the international member organisation working to develop and support global infrastructure facilitating data sharing and reuse. BioCommons Director, Dr Jeff Christiansen will co-lead the interest group meeting, Linking Pixels, Proteins & Populations: Integrating Data Across Life Science Domains. Prof Bernie Pope, A/Director, Human Genome Informatics (HGI), will deliver a Plenary with international colleagues: Open Research and Federated Systems: Disciplinary, Regional and International Perspectives. Bernie says he’s “thrilled to discuss the remarkable growth in research programs within Australia, driven by cutting-edge omics technologies. The current human omics research ecosystem is facing significant infrastructure challenges due to the explosion of complex data. This situation creates an urgent need for coordinated investment and scaling.”
SciDataCon addresses the frontier issues of data in research, and Jeff will co-lead the session, Digital Research Infrastructure Supporting FAIR, Reproducible and Impactful Research: A Global Ecosystem of Tools, Resources and Skills. The full-featured Australian Reference Genome Atlas (ARGA) app will be officially launched on Day 1 with The Australian Reference Genome Atlas: supercharged exploratory infrastructure for national-scale genomic data discovery.
There are several co-located events taking place in October, including the foundingGIDE community event. The community aims to establish a Global Image Data Ecosystem (GIDE) by developing common recommendations for metadata and interoperability in biological imaging, and have invited BioCommons Research Community Engagement Lead, Dr Johan Gustafsson, to contribute to the foundingGIDE Community Event Program to speak about Galaxy and WorkflowHub: Open Access to Large-Scale Image Analysis Workflows.
The following week in Brisbane, many of the BioCommons team will join eResearch Australasia, hosted by Australasian eResearch Organisations (AeRO) Inc. BioCommons Scientific Business Analyst, Keeva Connolly will present Harmonising metadata to improve data discoverability and interoperability, complementing the presentation from Dr Kathryn Hall and BioCommons authors, The importance of being indexed: introducing Genome Tracker by the Australian Reference Genome Atlas. BioCommons Software Engineering Group Lead, Amanda Zhu, is presenting Towards a Unified Access Infrastructure for Australia’s Life Sciences Platforms, and will be joined by many other BioCommons people at the conference.
Some BioCommons team members are travelling further afield, with Irene Hung, HGI Senior Project Manager, attending the Global Alliance for Genomics & Health (GA4GH) 13th Plenary Meeting in Uppsala, Sweden, to present a poster on the GUARDIANS program. Dr Tom Harrop, Senior Bioinformatician and Lead for the BioCommons Australian Tree of Life (AToL) project, will travel to Berlin for the BioHackathon Europe 2025. He will co-lead a project and ensure a close connection is maintained with the Australian Outpost of this event. Tom will also visit the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) and the Darwin Tree of Life Project (DToL) in the UK, ensuring alignment of AToL with these major international genomic initiatives.
Our team attends these meetings hoping to engage with our different communities, so we look forward to catching up with many of you in person!
