Building a successful international research community through data sharing: The case of the Wheat Information System (WheatIS)

The International Wheat Information System (WheatIS) Expert Working Group (EWG) was initiated in 2012 under the Wheat Initiative with a broad range of contributing organizations. The mission of the WheatIS EWG was to create an informational infrastructure, establish data standards, and build a single portal that allows search, retrieval, and display of globally distributed wheat data sets that are indexed in standard data formats at servers around the world. The web portal at WheatIS.org was released publicly in 2015, and by 2020, it expanded to 8 geographically-distributed nodes and around 20 organizations under its umbrella. In this paper, we present our experience, the challenges we faced, and the answer we brought for establishing an international research community to build an informational infrastructure. Our hope is that our experience with building wheatis.org will guide current and future research communities to facilitate institutional and international challenges to create global tools and resources to help their respective scientific communities.