Metabolomics Standards Workshop and the development of international standards for reporting metabolomics experimental results

Informatics standards and controlled vocabularies are essentialfor allowing information technology to help exchange, manage,interpret and compare large data collections. In a rapidly evolvingfield, the challenge is to work out how best to describe, butnot prescribe, the use of these technologies and methods. AMetabolomics Standards Workshop was held by the US NationalInstitutes of Health (NIH) to bring together multiple ongoingstandards efforts in metabolomics with the NIH research community.The goals were to discuss metabolomics workflows (methods, technologiesand data treatments) and the needs, challenges and potentialapproaches to developing a Metabolomics Standards Initiativethat will help facilitate this rapidly growing field which hasbeen a focus of the NIH roadmap effort. This report highlightsspecific aspects of what was presented and discussed at the1st and 2nd August 2005 Metabolomics Standards Workshop.