foundingGIDE: Building a Global Ecosystem for Data Sharing in Bioimaging

foundingGIDE is a consortium that unites research infrastructures, data repositories, community initiatives, and individual researchers to create an ecosystem for image data sharing.

Coordinated by Euro-BioImaging ERIC and funded by Horizon Europe, this project brings together European research infrastructures with those in Japan and Australia, including Microscopy Australia and the National Imaging Facility. The goal is to develop common recommendations for ontologies and metadata and to promote their adoption by researchers.

foundingGIDE has five key objectives to address the fragmentation and limited standardisation of bioimaging data:

1. Establish coordination among global open bioimage data resources.
2. Increase resource interoperability.
3. Engage with and provide guidance to community initiatives and end-users.
4. Plan for the sustainability of developed solutions.
5. Build an ecosystem for new interlinked resources to grow.

By tackling the challenges of data fragmentation and standardisation, foundingGIDE aims to create a robust and interoperable ecosystem for bioimaging data. This will empower resource sharing within the global scientific community, driving scientific discovery.

Recently, Dr David Poger, Data Manager at Microscopy Australia, presented on Australia’s National Persistent Identifier (PID) roadmap and Microscopy Australia’s plan to implement PIDs at facilities nationwide at the first foundingGIDE community event. PIDs are unique codes that globally identify and connect entities in the research system, such as researchers, funders, organisations, articles, datasets, software, and samples. Examples include ORCID and DOI to identify individuals and publications, respectively.

PIDs are crucial for tracking research provenance, impact tracking, and research integrity. They also enhance research innovation and efficiency by linking scientific concepts across systems. More information can be found in the ARDC’s Australian National Persistent Identifier (PID) Strategy and Roadmap, developed with contributions from our platform scientists and data manager.

A slide from David’s talk showing the kinds of information that can be tracked with PIDs and some examples of existing PIDs that are already contributing to this (DOI, ORCID, and ROR)

We look forward to hosting the next foundingGIDE community event in collaboration with the National Imaging Facility in October 2025 in Brisbane.

Key Partners

• European Research Infrastructures:

• • Euro-BioImaging
  • German BioImaging
  • Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche

• Australian Research Infrastructures:

• • Microscopy Australia
  • National Imaging Facility

• Japanese Research Infrastructures:

• • RIKEN