Recipient of the 2023 Excellence in Biocuration Early Career Award

Democratizing Biocuration, or, How I Learned to Love the Drive-by Curation

Charles Tapley Hoyt, Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology Harvard Medical School, MA, USA

Abstract: The increasing reliance of artificial intelligence applications in biomedicine on reliable structured data, metadata, and knowledge accentuates the need for effective, sustainable biocuration. While there has been a historical disconnect between such consumers and biocurators, the looming paradigm shift towards the open code, open data, and open infrastructure (O3) principles presents an opportunity to engage and empower consumers to contribute to the maintenance and ongoing development of the resources they use. In this talk, I will reflect on how biocuration became an important facet of my job as a systems and networks biologist interested in translational research as I became more aware of the importance of data quality and provenance. Notably, I will highlight the concept of the drive-by curation and how it fits into a more community-oriented future vision for biocuration.