5. DISCUSSION
The Ocean Barcode Atlas is an interactive DNA metabarcode web service
that supports exploratory analysis across the phylogenetic and
ecological spaces of a given barcode or taxon. It allows users to
concentrate on gaining biological meaning from large plankton barcode
datasets, without being hampered by the inherent heterogeneity of the
underlying data and the requirement for high performance computing
resources. No user account or email address is required to run OBA
analyses, which are fast enough to be rendered on the fly, stored for
convenience on the server for 15 days and reachable via the URL alone.
Currently provided with five metabarcode datasets, we plan to complement
the OBA service with further marine datasets as they become available.
For instance, we plan to include the forthcoming Tara Oceans
18S-V4 rRNA metabarcode dataset which will usefully complement the
current V9 based metabarcodes.
An additional ambition for OBA development, is to represent time series
datasets, such as those produced during the Ocean Sampling Day (Kopf et
al., 2015). Furthermore, we plan to create Docker containers running OBA
in order to allow users to locally analyse and privately share
geolocalized barcode datasets. An application programming interface
(API) is also being developed allowing programmatic access to OBA
resources similar to the OGA API that has proven to be a popular mode of
access also within the bioinformatics specialists community.