ELIXIR Belgium: tools and services

The Belgian ELIXIR node will be instrumental to optimize the interactions between the national level and ELIXIR Europe, and to integrate the Services offered by ELIXIR Belgium and the other European Nodes. ELIXIR Belgium focuses on Data Management, Data-analysis platforms, Training and Node Services in the Plant Sciences, Proteomics and Human Data Communities. VIB is the lead institute of ELIXIR Belgium and the partners are the universities of Ghent, Leuven, Antwerp, Brussels (VUB and ULB), Hasselt and Liège. The Sciensano Institute, grouping the Scientific Institute of Public Health (WIV-ISP) and the Veterinary and Agrochemical Research Centre (CODA-CERVA), will join ELIXIR Belgium later this year. Other stakeholders, mainly research institutes as the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) and the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ), are involved through the ELIXIR Belgium Interest Group. We are in close contact with Ontoforce, a Belgium software company active in improving the usability of data by using semantic web technologies, linked data and FAIR data principles. The core team of ELIXIR Belgium consists of Yves Van de Peer (HoN), Frederik Coppens (dHoN and TeC), Lieven Sterck (dTeC), Alexander Botzki (TrC) and Kim De Ruyck (Node coordinator). Our team is strengthened by a dedicated ELIXIR Belgium data science trainer and cloud coordinator, and several software developers in our partner institutes in Belgium. ELIXIR Belgium focuses on services in Human Data (WiNGS, VariantDB, MS DataConnect, DIDA), Plant Sciences (PLAZA, ORCAE, PIPPA) and Proteomics (Tabloid Proteome, Unipept, DynaMine, iMonDB). We specifically want to improve FAIRness of these resources, expand their functionality and work towards integration with existing European platforms. Additionally, we are preparing a number of these services for cloud deployment. Training courses and workshops related to data science are offered by the Belgian ELIXIR node and these events are prominently featured on the ELIXIR TeSS platform. Specific efforts towards workflows (Galaxy and Containers) and data management will be taken in the near future.