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.