F. Ortuño and I. Rojas (Eds.): IWBBIO 2015, Part II, LNCS 9044, pp. 426–430, 2015.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
BioWes – From Design of Experiment,
through Protocol to Repository, Control, Standardization
and Back-Tracking
Antonín Bárta, Petr Císař, Dmytro Soloviov, Pavel Souček, Dalibor Štys,
Štěpán Papáček, Aliaksandr Pautsina, Renata Rychtáriková, and Jan Urban
Institute of Complex Systems, South Bohemian Research Center of Aquaculture
and Biodiversity of Hydrocenoses, Faculty of Fisheries and Protection of Waters, University of
South Bohemia in České Budějovice, Zámek 136, Nové Hrady, 373 33, Czech Republic
abarta@frov.jcu.cz
Abstract. The amount of data produced by current experiments in systems
biology is enormous. Some database and software support for biology experi-
ments exist but usually deal just with some part of data and metadata manage-
ment. Primary data are only occasionally analyzed in-depth and shared. Studies
showed that cost of data sharing is cheaper than experimental work. Experimen-
tal costs are several orders higher than data. Therefore, being up to date is a
worldwide problem for all users of biology applications. In practice, the prob-
lem extends to general fields such as knowledge mining, experiment quality and
repeatability, and the philosophical epistemology of biological problems.
The BioWes project is inspired by several similar projects that try to solve a
substantial contemporary problem of sharing big amount of experimental data.
There are several projects that offer the solution for data sharing (for different
types of data). The problem is that the amount data produced by experimentalists
is constantly increasing and the speed of internet will always be a step behind.
The effective and easier way how to share experimental data between researchers
is to share metadata. Metadata means the overall knowledge about the experiment
that consist of complex information of experimental procedure and knowledge
that can be extracted from data automatically or manually by post-processing. The
data itself is meaningless without any additional knowledge concerning the expe-
riment. There is no project that can offer the whole concept of experimental data
sharing and data processing based on the sharing of knowledge.
Keywords: Database, Repository, Metadata, Data management, Protocols,
Experiment setup, Design of experiment.
1 Introduction
The project BioWes is inspired by several similar projects that try to solve a
substantial contemporary problem of sharing big amount of experimental data. There
are several projects that offer the solution for data sharing (for different types of data).