The Open Bioinformatics Foundation is a
non-profit
A nonprofit organization (NPO), also known as a nonbusiness entity, nonprofit institution, not-for-profit organization, or simply a nonprofit, is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or so ...
, volunteer-run organization focused on supporting
open source programming in
bioinformatics
Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and Bioinformatics software, software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, ...
.
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 h ...
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, a satellite meeting of the
Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology conference.
The foundation participates in the
Google Summer of Code, acting as an umbrella organisation for individual bioinformatics-related projects.
The Open Bioinformatics Foundation was started in 2001, arising from the
BioJava,
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 Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...
. 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 and Hilmar Lapp (
NESCent), 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:
*
BioJava – Java toolkit
*
BioMOBY – Data and application execution through web services
*
BioPerl – Perl toolkit
*
BioPython – Python toolkit
*
BioRuby – Ruby toolkit
*
BioPHP
*
EMBOSS – Sequence analysis toolkit.
See also
*
List of open-source bioinformatics software
*
Generic Model Organism Database
References
External links
Open Bioinformatics Foundation website
{{Software in the Public Interest
Bioinformatics organizations
Free software project foundations