Abstract
MIRRI-IT, the Italian Node of the Microbial Resource Research Infrastructure (MIRRI), was recognizedby the Italian government as a National Research Infrastructure in 2021. Recently, the project"Strengthening the MIRRI Italian Research Infrastructure for Sustainable Bioscience and Bioeconomy"has been funded to support its empowerment.The main objective of this project are: (a) to implement MIRRI-IT’s organisation and set up itsoperative procedures and quality standards; (b) to improve the Italian microbial Biological ResourceCenters database quality and conceive MIRRI-IT’s services based on the partners’ expertise andgenetic resources; (c) to set up a single entry point platform to promote the MIRRI-IT's resources interms of data, services, cutting-edge technologies and expertise.In this contest, the new needs for data integration and system interoperability, stressed by the FAIRapproach to data sharing, have become evident and urgent.In this work, we will present a pilot project to investigate how the semantic annotation of microbialinformation could be suitably stored using the open-source repository software Dataverse Harvard,one of the most common tools for improving data FAIRness.It will be carried out thanks to a strong collaboration between MIRRI-IT and the MIRRI task force forthe FAIRification of MIRRI-IS, potentially leading to new best practices for semantic annotation ofmicrobial information. This pilot project will be based on a Dataverse repository instance made up offive main components: the application, the database, the search engine, the file storage and theDigital Object Identifier (DOI) service.To ensure a high level of performance, security and scalability for the whole project an open-sourcecloud PaaS will be specifically developed.