MIABIS — Minimum Information About BIobank data Sharing
Overview
MIABIS (Minimum Information About BIobank data Sharing) is a biobank-specific terminology that standardises the data elements used to describe biobanks, sample collections, and their donors, so that holdings can be discovered and compared across institutions without moving the physical material. It is the metadata standard underpinning the BBMRI-ERIC Directory and is relevant wherever biological samples need to be made findable, which is the discovery problem specific to the biosamples domain: a sample cannot be copied to a repository, so a harmonised description of what each biobank holds is what makes it accessible to researchers.
MIABIS was originally developed in 2012 by the Swedish node of BBMRI to facilitate biobank and sample-collection data sharing. MIABIS Core 2.0 (Merino-Martinez et al., 2016) defined attributes for describing biobanks, collections, and studies at an aggregate level, and became the de facto European biobank metadata standard. Individual-level components for samples, sample donors, and events were added in 2020 (Eklund et al.). MIABIS Core 3.0 (Eklund et al., 2024) restructured the standard around four entities (Biobank, Collection, Research Resource, and Network) and extended it to cover biobanks that work primarily with data rather than physical samples, alongside new attributes for biobank capabilities and quality.
Structure and extensions
MIABIS Core 3.0 is modular, so a biobank can adopt the entities relevant to it and extend the standard locally. Beyond the aggregate-level Core, the individual-level Sample, Sample Donor, and Event components describe holdings at the level of a single specimen. A DICOM-MIABIS extension links radiological imaging metadata to biobank descriptions, connecting the standard to the imaging biobanks discussed in the Bioimaging and Neuroimaging perspectives. The first version of MIABIS Core was ontologised in 2013 (OMIABIS) and later folded into the Ontology for Biobanking (OBIB), giving its terms machine-resolvable form.
Governance
Development of MIABIS is coordinated by the Common Service IT operations of BBMRI-ERIC through a multi-country governance process, with each revision defined by an expert working group and approved by BBMRI-ERIC. This is the same governance layer that operates the BBMRI-ERIC Directory and Negotiator, so the standard and the infrastructure that uses it evolve together.
Connections
- governedBy: BBMRI-ERIC
- relatedTo: OMOP CDM (BBMRI-ERIC pairs MIABIS biobank metadata with OMOP CDM for the clinical and phenotypic data associated with samples)
- relatedTo: GA4GH (BBMRI-ERIC Negotiator combines MIABIS collection descriptions with GA4GH DUO consent terms for access requests)
Resources
- https://miabis.bbmri-eric.eu (MIABIS documentation and current Core specification)
- https://github.com/BBMRI-ERIC/miabis (reference repository)
- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1089/bio.2023.0074 (Eklund et al. 2024, MIABIS Core v3)
- https://doi.org/10.1089/bio.2019.0129 (Eklund et al. 2020, sample and donor components)
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24849882/ (Merino-Martinez et al. 2016, MIABIS 2.0 Core)