The Open Bioinformatics Foundation is a

non-profit A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...

, volunteer-run organization focused on supporting

open source programming Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...

. The mission of the foundation is to support the development of open source toolkits for bioinformatics, organise developer-centric

hackathon A hackathon (also known as a hack day, hackfest, datathon or codefest; a portmanteau of hacking and marathon) is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering over a relatively short period of time such as 24 or 48 hours. Th ...

events and generally assist in the development and promotion of open source software development in the life sciences. The foundation also organises and runs the annual

Bioinformatics Open Source Conference The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) is an academic conference on Open source, open-source programming and other open science practices in bioinformatics, organised by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation. The conference has been held an ...

, a satellite meeting of the

Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) is an annual academic conference on the subjects of bioinformatics and computational biology organised by the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). The principal focus of the co ...

conference. The foundation participates in the

Google Summer of Code The Google Summer of Code, often abbreviated to GSoC, is an international annual program in which Google awards stipends to contributors who successfully complete a free and open-source software coding project during the summer. , the program is ...

, acting as an umbrella organisation for individual bioinformatics-related projects. The Open Bioinformatics Foundation was started in 2001, arising from the

BioJava BioJava is an open-source software project dedicated to provide Java tools to process biological data.VS Matha and P Kangueane, 2009, ''Bioinformatics: a concept-based introduction'', 2009. p26 BioJava is a set of library functions written in the ...

, BioPerl and BioPython projects. A formal membership for the foundation was created in 2005. In October 2012, the foundation began an association with

Software in the Public Interest Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (SPI) is a US 501(c)(3) non-profit organization domiciled in New York State formed to help other organizations create and distribute free open-source software and open-source hardware. Anyone is eligible to ...

(SPI), a US-based non-profit which aids other organizations in the creation and distribution of free and

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...

. The association with SPI allows financial donations to the foundation (these are 501(c)3 tax-exempt in the US). The foundation is governed by a board of directors, representing various Bio* projects. As of 2019, the OBF President is Peter Cock ( BioPython). Previous OBF presidents include

Ewan Birney John Frederick William Birney (known as Ewan Birney) (born 6 December 1972) is joint director of EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire and deputy director general of the European Molecular Biology Labora ...

and Hilmar Lapp (

NESCent The United States National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) is a scientific research center in Durham, North Carolina Durham ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of North Carolina and the county seat of Durham County, North Carolina, Durham C ...

), previous Board members include Steven E. Brenner.

Projects

The foundation hosts servers for mailing lists, websites, and code repositories for a number of bioinformatics-related open source projects, including: *

– Java toolkit *

BioMOBY BioMOBY is a registry of web services used in bioinformatics. It allows interoperability between biological data hosts and analytical services by annotating services with terms taken from standard ontologies. BioMOBY is released under the Artistic ...

– Data and application execution through web services * BioPerl – Perl toolkit * BioPython – Python toolkit * BioRuby – Ruby toolkit *

BioPHP BioPHP is a collection of open-source PHP code, with classes for DNA and protein sequence analysis, alignment, database parsing, and other bioinformatics tools. BioRuby is released under the GNU GPL version 2 licence and is one of a number of Bi ...

EMBOSS EMBOSS is a free open source software analysis package developed for the needs of the molecular biology and bioinformatics user community. The software automatically copes with data in a variety of formats and even allows transparent retrieval o ...

– Sequence analysis toolkit.

References

External links

Open Bioinformatics Foundation website
{{Software in the Public Interest Bioinformatics organizations Free software project foundations

Projects

See also

References

External links