Australian Informatics Resource (AIR) joins OBiBa

Prepared by Vincent Ferretti, Lyle Palmer, Philippe Laflamme, and Paul White

The Australian Informatics Resource (AIR) has officially joined forces with OBiBa to produce a part of OBiBa's suite of open source software for biobanks. AIR was formerly known as WAGER.

OBiBa aims to offer a collaborative infrastructure for the development of high quality, open source software specifically designed for biobanks. OBiBa is currently comprised of several software development projects, each staffed with a team of experts focussed on building software modules that support different biobank activities. The ultimate objective is to provide the international biobanking community with a free, complete, and customizable open source Biobank Information Management System.

AIR has similar goals. The two teams have focussed on different aspects of an overall biobanking informatics solution, and are thus highly complementary.

As an initial collaboration in this new partnership, the AIR team will be undertaking the development of a participant Enrollment and Tracking Application (ETA) for integration into the OBiBa application suite.

Further collaboration will focus on additional complementary projects, enhancing the efficiency of both teams and increasing the rate of progress towards the goal of a ‘gold-standard’ open-source biobanking informatics infrastructure distributed through P3G and related networks.