Oxford e-Research Centre

Life, Natural and Biomedical Sciences

Driving digital research and providing services to the Life, Natural and Medical Sciences

Projects we drive or collaborate in focus on data capture, curation, representation, stewardship, sharing and publishing; to ensure value is not lost, and facilitating the interpretation and the corroboration of results, making for more efficient practice.

We work with and for our international collaborators to build and extend software, develop and apply community-driven terminologies, ontology, data standards and semantic web methodologies, research and evaluate ways to improve data reusability and reproducibility, and offer data standardization and curation as a services.

Funded by BBSRC, MRC, NERC & the European Commission, we're active in an increasingly diverse range of areas including biodiversity, environmental health and environmental genomics, metabolomics, (meta)genomics, functional genomics, proteomics, system biology, stem cell &toxicogenomics.

Our collaborators & users include: the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute; the FDA National Centre for Toxicological Research; Harvard School of Public Health; Nature Publishing Group, NERC Environmental 'Omics Centre; Janssen Pharmaceuticals; The Novartis Institute for BioMedical Research and many more.

If you would like to find out more about our work in Life, Natural and Medical Sciences or are interested in collaborating with us, please get in touch.

Current Projects

ISA – standards-compliant data management tools

Providing a tool kit to facilitate standards compliant collection, curation and local management of experiments in the life-sciences

Digital platforms for scholarly publishing

Collaborations with scientific, technical and medical publishers to develop novel data platforms to track and publish scholarly outputs

ELIXIR's UK Node

The UK Node contributes the country’s substantial expertise in bioinformatics training for researchers, computer scientists and data managers in the Life, Natural and Medical Sciences.

Metagenomics Data Infrastructure

Coordinated by EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, the Metagenomics service is being developed to be an automated pipeline for the curation, archiving and analysis of metagenomic data.

COSMOS - COordination Of Standards In MetabOlomicS

Coordinated by EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, COSMOS (Coordination of Standards in Metabolomics) has brought together European metabolomics data providers to set and promote community standards.

OBI - Ontology for BioMedical Investigation

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) project is an international, collaborative effort to build an integrated ontology for the description of biological and clinical investigations.

BioSharing – standards, policies and databases

a web-based catalogue to centralize bioscience data policies, reporting standards and links to other related portals; and a communication forum to maintain linkages between funders, journals & standardization leaders

Past Projects

ViBRANT - The Virtual Biodiversity Research and Access Network for Taxonomy

A European Union FP7 funded project to support the development of virtual research communities involved in biodiversity science, providing a more integrated and effective framework for those managing biodiversity data on the Web

NeuroHub

Neuroscience is a multidisciplinary activity involving participants collaborating from the mathematical, physical and life sciences as well as the medical sciences. It is dependent upon information technologies, computational capabilities and access to a range of instruments.

UK NGS - Development & Operation

The UK National Grid Service (NGS) is a national consortium of computational and data resource that makes use of defined open standard grid interfaces to provide services to academia.

e-HealthPlus: Citizen-driven Information for Healthcare and Wellbeing

A project focussing on the digital challenges of providing personalised health information to help spot problems before they happen

Cancer & Cardiac Imaging

The Cancer and Cardiac Imaging project is a collaboration between University of Oxford and the Technical Computing Initiative of Microsoft Corporation

Lowering the barriers to cancer imaging

Providing a medical image analysis framework & investigating collaborative technologies for the analysis of medical images

Bio-Image Informatics

Developing bio-image analysis and processing solutions for the University of Oxford, across physics, biochemistry, biology, engineering &computer science.

A Virtual Research Environment framework for Cancer Imaging

Providing a framework to allow researchers and clinicians involved in Cancer Imaging to share information, images and algorithms.