PhenomUK Community Software Data Requirements report

Report mapping the community requirements on Software and Data
Authors:
Sotirios A Tsaftaris (s.tsaftaris@ed.ac.uk)
Valerio Giuffrida (valerio.giuffrida@nottingham.ac.uk)
This report aims to provide recommendations of the software provision required to run and support
the digital research infrastructure for the PhenomUK community. To have a better idea of the needs
of the UK plant research community, we conducted several interviews and collected information
on three major aspects: (i) data collection; (ii) software tools; (iii) FAIR data. After several months
of gathering insights from researchers via interviews, we found the following points as the current
pressing issues the community faces: (i) Manual software pipelines cause bottlenecks in data
analysis; (ii) Bespoke code gets forgotten, becoming legacy in a short timeframe; (iii) Data storage
is always insufficient as needs grow; (iv) Data curation and sharing is still an issue for many. To
address these community needs, we propose a set of recommendations to inform future directions
of the PhenomUK Scoping Project.