Starting in October 2020 until September 2025, the European Galaxy team in Freiburg will participate in the consortium DataPLANT for the development of a service and data infrastructure designed to record and deliver large data volumes for modern crop research funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

DataPLANT will provide a gateway to plant research data, ensuring open standards according to FAIR principles implementing a (meta)data standardization process based on international standards and rules that enables national and international interoperability and interfacing.

The overall goal of DataPLANT is to provide the research data management practices, tools, and infrastructure to enable such collaborative research in plant biology. More specifically:

1. A specific community standard for fundamental plant research (meta)data and workflow annotation, based on generic, existing and emerging standards and ontologies in plant science and beyond.
2. A robust, federated research environment for data computation and management covering the complete data lifecycle.
3. Assistive mechanisms ranging from data stewards to intelligent software services to build, link and maintain the complete research context during data acquisition, curation, analysis, and publication.
4. Mechanisms for collaborative research based on enrichment and automatized crosslinking of plant-research specific (meta)data to facilitate research context management.
5. A platform for data provenance and research sharing including a motivation and credit system to foster the incentive to democratize research data.
6. Comprehensive training to ensure data legacy through lectures, courses, workshops and summer schools and providing open training material.
7. A central plant data HUB for aggregating services and knowledge, generating a searchable compendium for research in plant biology.