Sprecher
Beschreibung
Comprehensive metadata is essential to ensure data findability and reusability in accordance with FAIR principles. However, keeping pace with the myriad of checklists defined by different research communities and repositories can be an overwhelming task. To address this, DataPLANT, the German NFDI for plants, facilitates the provision of precise metadata through the use of Annotated Research Contexts (ARCs). An ARC serves as a FAIR Digital Object (FDO) that bundles data, metadata, and workflows into a single package, ensuring research remains transparent and reproducible.
Central to this ecosystem is the Swate annotation tool for Excel, which is used within an ARC to create annotation tables based on the Investigation Study Assay (ISA) framework. Swate provides over 40 pre-assembled, curated templates covering a wide range of needs, including minimum information standards like MIAPPE for plant phenotyping and MIMS for metagenome sequences, as well as checklists for major repositories like the European Nucleotide Archive and MetaboLights. These templates utilize integrated ontology terms and prefilled examples to simplify data entry while ensuring consistency.
While researchers can use these templates as provided, the system remains flexible; templates can be modified, extended, or combined to suit specific project requirements. Different research communities can also contribute their own standard operating procedures through documented GitHub workflows. To assist users in navigating these resources, DataPLANT offers a metadata quiz to help identify relevant standards based on the specific organism and data type. Finally, the submission process is streamlined by tools like ARC2Repo, which convert the metadata stored within an ARC into the required formats for repository deposit. By integrating these tools, DataPLANT ensures that plant science data is uniformly annotated and easily shared.