processing PhylOData (pPOD)

Some good news! pPOD, a NSF-funded project on integrating data from AToL (A Tree of Life) projects has been funded. Val Tannen (right) is the co-ordinating PI. I'm a consultant, which means more opportunities to mouth-off about phylogenetic data and databases (for earlier examples see TreeBASE rocks, TreeBASE talk at CIPRES, and Towards the ToL database - some visions).
The project is called pPOD, and has a wiki. The goals are:

1. Develop an extensible core data model for phylogenetic data.
   The model will include a query language as well as extensible data structures and will benefit from research on efficiently querying phylogenetic data.


2. Develop schema mappings for peer-to-peer data integration and exchange, where a project can join existing integration groups by providing mappings between the schema of their data and the core data model or one of its extensions.


3. Develop a scientific workflow system (lab notebook) that will allow research groups to put together the data integration components with the local database access components and with the analysis tools.

The project is collecting suggestions, experience and, eventually, usecases from the community, and is inviting contributions to its wiki.