The principles of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability (FAIR) have been identified as goals that data repositories should meet to enhance the usefulness of their data holdings. The IEDB’s publication “FAIR principles and the IEDB: short-term improvements and a long-term vision of OBO-foundry mediated machine-actionable interoperability”, presented at the 2018 Biocuration conference at Shanghai in April, assesses how well the IEDB complies with these principles. It can be downloaded here: 29688354.pdf (410.0 KB)
Ontologies play a critical role in compliance with FAIR principles, and The Ontology for Immune Epitopes (ONTIE) provides a structured, semantically rich, and standardized framework for data representation. Selecting IEDB Ontology from the pull-down menu takes the user to http://ontology.iedb.org, the home page for the Ontology of Immune Epitopes (ONTIE). The IEDB ontology is available to download in a format that can be viewed with the Protégé OWL editor. ONTIE is currently under development and additional files are being prepared.
Additionally, the IEDB has been certified as a Trustworthy Data Repository by the CoreTrustSeal Standards and Certification Board until 30 September 2026. The full application can be found here.