2018 ASHS Annual Conference

Tripal is an open-source software platform for building online community or project databases that house genes, genomes, markers, germplasm, genotypes, phenotypes and other data types. A number of specialized community databases that use Tripal are tailored for horticultural and agricultural crops such as fruits, nuts, legumes, cotton, and forest trees. With active code contributors from 8 research groups in 3 countries, Tripal has emerged as a model of cooperative database development across specialty crops and as a mechanism for increased sustainability of community-level and community-built web resources. Based on the content management system Drupal, Tripal enables developers to easily write their own custom code and share with others. The community is building the primary infrastructure to support standardized biological data storage formats, intuitive data visualization, and commonly needed analysis tools. With increasing maturity of the software and a growing number of member databases, Tripal is now poised to take advantage of the shared code base across groups by building cross-site interfaces that unify data across various specialty crop communities. This is largely enabled by the latest version of Tripal v3, a fully ontology-driven design with data structures and RESTful web services. With the new major expansion of the Tripal module that leverages ElasticSearch, sites are able to provide comprehensive full text search to users and also incorporate search results from other public Tripal databases. For example, the Hardwood Genomics Project can return relevant search results from its own data stores as well as results from other sites with tree data such as TreeGenes, the Genome Database for Rosaceae and the Citrus Genome Database. The growth of the Tripal community demonstrates how to drive advances in large scale cyberinfrastructure development and data integration through collaborations among smaller, specialized research communities.