For the People, By the People
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Genesys Portal Improvements
Genesys currently contains passport data on 3.6 million plant accessions conserved in 482 collections around the world. Most of these records are from CGIAR, USDA and EURISCO genebanks. Sounds like a lot of data, right? It is, and this number will continue to increase in the years to come, along will the platform’s capabilities and efficacy.
Genesys serves as the primary data source for a number of activities of the CGIAR Genebank Platform, and these activities rely on up-to-date accession information. As such, development of Genesys is a high priority and an element of the Genebank Platform’s “Use Module.” The Module aims to empower users of genebank materials and associated data with intuitive query tools for enhanced discovery of crop diversity relevant to their specific needs.
The development of Genesys, therefore, will be driven by user needs. A use case developer will visit, survey, interview and document user needs, expectations and data requirements. Use cases will then be developed with partners that will set priorities and steer Genesys implementation.
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Portal highlights
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Genesys as source of data on ex situ holdings for the Second Global Plan of Action on PGRFA, learn more.
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What's your Genesys experience? We're working to improve Genesys, and we'd appreciate your insight in a short survey.
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During the first half of 2017, we received nearly 800,000 data updates from 105 genebanks! Keep up with the latest updates to passport data on our new web page.
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There's a video for that! We've prepared a series of short video tutorials to illustrate how to perform certain search queries: searching for IR 8, Crop Wild Relatives, salt-tolerant purple rice, spell-checking taxonomic data and more. For all video tutorials, check out our YouTube channel.
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As part of the Genesys Catalog, William Solano, CATIE Researcher, visited the Crop Trust. In this blog, William tells us a bit about this collective effort - en español!
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project progress
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The Genesys Catalog of Phenotypic Datasets
Many exciting things have happened during the first half of 2017 for the Genesys team. We have been working closely together with our partners at the World Vegetable Center in Taiwan, CATIE in Costa Rica, GeRRI in Kenya, MARDI in Malaysia and NPGRL in the Philippines in the identification and preparation of datasets of phenotypic data derived from germplasm accessions for publication under the umbrella of the “Genesys catalog of phenotypic datasets” project. Such dataset preparation includes recovering information such as the creators involved in the making of the dataset and location where the samples were sown and then measured. In addition to this, our partners are also recovering associated data relevant to the interpretation and reuse of their datasets.
All pilot phenotypic datasets will be published in Genesys. For this, we are working on the development of a site where partners can publish their annotated datasets, and users can query such information. Having this information visible and associated to germplasm accessions will help germplasm users to target material more efficiently. Likewise, the preparation and annotation of datasets is boosting our partners to improve their current data management procedures.
As part of our project activities, we visited our partners to discover existing standards that help data management and exchange, and to start the preparation of the datasets that will be published in the catalog. We also discussed existing and desirable procedures that would help our partners to maintain data integrity in time, and thus prevent data loss.
This work is being possible thanks to the kind funding provided by the Federal Office for Agriculture and Food (BLE) in Germany.
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