Oxford e-Research Centre, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, 7 Keble Road, Oxford, OX1 3QG, UK.
Department of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University, Box 513, 75120 Uppsala, Sweden.
Gigascience. 2021 Sep 16;10(9). doi: 10.1093/gigascience/giab060.
The Investigation/Study/Assay (ISA) Metadata Framework is an established and widely used set of open source community specifications and software tools for enabling discovery, exchange, and publication of metadata from experiments in the life sciences. The original ISA software suite provided a set of user-facing Java tools for creating and manipulating the information structured in ISA-Tab-a now widely used tabular format. To make the ISA framework more accessible to machines and enable programmatic manipulation of experiment metadata, the JSON serialization ISA-JSON was developed.
In this work, we present the ISA API, a Python library for the creation, editing, parsing, and validating of ISA-Tab and ISA-JSON formats by using a common data model engineered as Python object classes. We describe the ISA API feature set, early adopters, and its growing user community.
The ISA API provides users with rich programmatic metadata-handling functionality to support automation, a common interface, and an interoperable medium between the 2 ISA formats, as well as with other life science data formats required for depositing data in public databases.
Investigation/Study/Assay(ISA)元数据框架是一套已被广泛采用的开源社区规范和软件工具,用于支持发现、交换和发布生命科学实验的元数据。原始的 ISA 软件套件提供了一组面向用户的 Java 工具,用于创建和操作以 ISA-Tab 结构化的信息——这是一种现在广泛使用的表格格式。为了使 ISA 框架更容易被机器访问,并支持对实验元数据进行编程操作,开发了 JSON 序列化的 ISA-JSON。
在这项工作中,我们介绍了 ISA API,这是一个 Python 库,用于通过使用作为 Python 对象类的公共数据模型来创建、编辑、解析和验证 ISA-Tab 和 ISA-JSON 格式。我们描述了 ISA API 的功能集、早期采用者以及不断增长的用户社区。
ISA API 为用户提供了丰富的编程元数据处理功能,以支持自动化、通用接口以及在 2 个 ISA 格式之间以及与其他生命科学数据格式之间的互操作,这些数据格式是在公共数据库中存储数据所必需的。