COPO: Extending the frontiers of “FAIR” data in agriculture

Abstract Modern scientific advances are increasingly reliant on data. In the agricultural sector, for instance, much of today’s research and innovation are driven by the integration of ever-increasing amounts of heterogeneous data from disparate sources. Whereas the awareness of the FAIR principles for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable data has increased, challenges still exist to implement these principles for storing, managing, analysing and distributing data. Collaborative Open Plant Omics (COPO) is a system that attempts to address some of these challenges by enabling scientists to describe their data and research objects using community-sanctioned metadata, and then use public or institutional repositories to share it with the wider scientific community. Data generators are encouraged to use rich semantic metadata when publishing research objects, thus allowing data consumers and tools to find, aggregate, and analyse data which was previously invisible or not shared at all. COPO supports a number of data standards or schemas including the CG Core 2.0 schema (https://agriculturalsemantics.github.io/cg-core/cgcore.html), implemented for use by CGIAR centres. CG Core 2.0 is a schema produced by the CGIAR Big Data Platform to collect information on socio-agronomic studies, thus harmonising data input between CGIAR centres. These centres store their data on locally hosted, publicly accessible digital repositories based on one of three repository software types, i.e. DataVerse, dSpace or CKAN. COPO user interface wizards allow metadata to be added to research objects (e.g., datafiles) with guided help and natural workflows. Metadata can be suggested, that might be appropriate for data based on past submissions and similar workflows. By building upon existing standards to push the state of the art in agricultural data dissemination and mining, COPO seeks to ease the burden of sharing and reusing data by the community. COPO is entirely open source and is freely available on GitHub. A production instance of the platform for use by the community as well as more information can be found at copo-project.org.