Linking data across sites in the Genomic Observatories network's Ocean Sampling Day.

(A) Ocean Sampling Day involves the simultaneous sampling of the world's oceans on a single day, as represented by the red stars on the map of the earth. Multiple ocean water sampling processes take place at each location. Those water samples are filtered to produce samples of organismal communities that are submitted to the bioarchive at the Smithsonian Institution. A subsample of the filtered material is analyzed to produce a metagenomic sequence, which may be stored in the Genomes Online Database (GOLD). To be useful in comparative studies, data from each process at each location must be accessible and interpretable. (B) A graphical representation of how part of the workflow shown in A (from ocean water sampling to filtering to metagenomic sequencing) can be annotated with terms from multiple, coordinated ontologies and queried via an ontology-based data store. Ontology classes are shown as ovals and instances are shown as rectangles, with instances color-coded to match their parent classes. This figure shows how a metagenomic sequence and the taxa associated with it can be linked back to the original Ocean Sampling Day collecting event through a chain of inputs and outputs.