Supporting data for "Ontology-Driven Analysis of Marine Metagenomics: What More Can We Learn from Our Data?"

The proliferation of metagenomic sequencing technologies have enabled novel insights into the functional genomic potentials and taxonomic structure of microbial communities. However, cyberinfrastructure efforts to manage and enable the reproducible analysis of sequence data have not kept pace. Thus, there is increasing recognition of the need to make metagenomic data discoverable within machine searchable frameworks compliant with the FAIR principles for data stewardship. Although a variety of metagenomic web services exist, none currently leverage the hierarchically structured terminology encoded within common life-science ontologies to programmatically discover data. Here, we integrate large-scale marine metagenomic datasets with community-driven life-science ontologies into a novel FAIR web service. This approach enables the retrieval of data discovered by intersecting the knowledge represented within ontologies against the functional genomic potential and taxonomic structure computed from marine sequencing data. Our findings highlight various microbial functional and taxonomic patterns relevant to the ecology of prokaryotes in various aquatic environments. Most importantly, we present and evaluate a novel web service accessible through an open API that can be used to ask novel biological questions of existing metagenomic datasets. Finally, the FAIR ontology searchable data products provided by our API can be leveraged by future research efforts.