User:Imabossbrother/sandbox

The BioCompute Object (BCO) is a community driven project to build a system for standardizing computations and analyses generated from High-throughput sequencing (HTS), also referred to as next-generation sequencing (NGS) or massively parallel sequencing (MPS). Started as a collaborative contract between the George Washington University and the Food and Drug Administration, The BCO aims to ease the exchange of HTS workflows between various organizations, such as the FDA, pharmaceutical companies, bioinformatic platform providers and academic researchers.

=Need for BCO= The variability of tangible experiments due to the plentitude of environmental and procedural factors is well documented. What is often systematically overlooked is that computational biology algorithms are affected by a multiplicity of parameters and are no less volatile. The complexities of computation protocols and interpretation of outcomes is only part of the challenge; there are also virtually no standardized and industry-accepted metadata schemas for reporting the computational pipelines and parameters together with their results. Thus, it is often impossible to reproduce the results of a previously performed computation due to missing information on parameters, versions, arguments, conditions, and procedures of application launch.

The BCO concept has been developed specifically to satisfy regulatory research needs for evaluation, validation, and verification of bioinformatics pipelines; however, there is potential utility of BCO within the larger scientific community. This utility can be increased through the creation of a BCO database comprising records relevant to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. A BioCompute Object database record will be similar to a GenBank record in form; however, instead of describing a sequence, the BioCompute record will include information related to parameters, dependencies, usage, and other information related to the specific computational instance. This mechanism will extend similar efforts and also serve as a collaborative ground to ensure interoperability between different platforms, industries, scientists, regulators, and other

=Purpose=

=BCO Consortium= The BioCompute Object working group facilitates a means for different stakeholders in the HTS communities to provide input on current practices on the BCO. This working group was formed during preparation for the 2017 HTS Computational Standards for Regulatory Sciences Workshop, and was initially made up of the workshop participants, both speakers and panelists. There has been a continual growth of the BCO working group as a direct result of the interaction between a variety of stakeholders from all interested communities in standardization of computational HTS data processing. The Public-Private partnerships formed between universities, private genomic data companies, software platforms, government and regulatory institutions has been an easy point of entry for new individuals or institutions into the BCO project to participate in the discussion of best practices for the objects.

=2017 HTS-CSRS Workshop=

=Proof of Concept=

=Conceptual Schema and Data Types= BioCompute is a paradigm and a BioCompute Object is an instance of that paradigm.

= References =

=External links=
 * The public version of the BioCompute Object (BCO) specification document Standard Trial Use (STU) Release 1.0 is available at https://osf.io/myuxq/