BioOne: a national-scale platform for integrated discovery and utilization of diverse biological resources in South Korea

Abstract The rapid growth of biological resources and associated research outputs has increased the complexity of resource discovery, access, and reuse across heterogeneous repositories. However, fragmented metadata schemas, limited interoperability, and siloed access mechanisms continue to hinder the integrated exploration of biological resources and their associated knowledge. Herein, we present BioOne (Biological resources One-Stop service platform), a unified informatics framework designed to address the fragmentation of national biological resources by integrating heterogeneous metadata from 14 distinct clusters and establishing a seamless resource-to-knowledge pipeline to enhance the discoverability and practical utilization of biological assets. BioOne is a national-scale web-based discovery platform that harmonizes biological resource metadata across 14 domain-specific biological resource clusters in Korea and systematically links these resources with external knowledge objects, including research papers, patents, biological datasets, and disease–drug–target information, through a unified discovery interface. To achieve this, we adopted a standard-aligned metadata integration framework, interoperable identifier mapping, and a modular system architecture to support scalable indexing, cross-domain search, and association-based navigation. By extending conventional catalog-based biological resource databases with an integrated discovery and access layer connecting distributed biorepositories to evidence-oriented knowledge resources, BioOne provides an informatics infrastructure for data-driven discovery, translational research, and coordinated utilization of biological resources at the national scale. The BioOne also offers a transferable implementation model for the large-scale integration of distributed biological resource systems.