Data Sharing in Radiobiology; Towards FAIR

The value of scientific data depends on their findability, accessibility, integrability and reusability
according to the FAIR principles. Together with the sustainability of data preservation and access, these
principles underpin the long term benefits of scientific research. Within the domain of radiobiology we
have a huge array of data types, themes and complexities which make standardisation of metadata, data
structure and data integration very challenging. Moreover, it is clear that, for example, in the area of
disaster preparedness, the ready discovery and availability of multiple types of data, for example on
biological effects of exposure, climatology, ecology, human behavioural and attitudinal studies, is
important for an integrated scientific approach.

Because these data are spread over many databases, journal supplementary information resources and
even the computers of the investigators, their discovery and reuse can be challenging. Despite
exhortations from funding agencies and scientific institutions over the past two decades there is still a
serious deficit in the willingness and in some cases the ability of investigators to share data, and although
much may not be formally „Public domain“, information about the existence of the data, their metadata,
and how to obtain them should always be available.

We report the progress of work on three databases, the STORE and the NASA GeneLab and LSDA
repositories to leverage the Radiation Biology Ontology (RBO), a structured terminology for metadata
that can be used by all radiation biology-relevant databases to unite federated and automated data
searches across multiple databases, for example using web services, and through semantic web
technologies supporting data discovery.

The initial primary use-cases for RBO were archiving data in the STORE database
(https://www.storedb.org/), the repository used for the RadoNorm and Pianoforte Projects among others,
and in the NASA Open Science Data Repository (https://osdr.nasa.gov/bio). The scope of radiobiology
research ranges from basic physics to radiation oncology to sociolegal studies; no existing ontology had
the necessary breadth or depth to fulfill this need. In addition, a formal ontology has the advantage of
being usable for machine learning and, importantly, for tasks like data integration, knowledge extraction
from the scientific literature and for query extension and data classification. Standardisation of metadata
is one of the primary objectives of the FAIR principles for open data; RBO is an important landmark for
FAIR-compliant radiation biology data sharing.

The RBO is developed using the open-source tools of GitHub and the OBO Foundry-led Ontology
Development Kit, and published through GitHub and the NIH/NCBI BioPortal website. This initial
phase of concept modeling has yielded an ontology that has more than 300 declared concepts, with more
than 3500 additional concepts imported from other OBO Foundry ontologies with relevance to radiation
biology (for example, concepts from the ISO standard Basic Formal Ontology, the Environment
Ontology and the Gene Ontology).

We welcome input into the development of RBO and encourage its adoption.