GenomeSpace Tools and Data Sources

ISAcreator

Project Website: https://isa-tools.org/

The open source ISA metadata tracking tools help to manage an increasingly diverse set of life science, environmental, and biomedical experiments that employ one or a combination of technologies.

Built around the Investigation (the project context), Study (a unit of research), and Assay (analytical measurement) general-purpose tabular (ISA-TAB) format, the ISA tools support description and enrichment of experimental metadata (i.e., sample characteristics, technology, measurement types, and sample-to-data relationships), to help with provenance tracking and encourage good data stewardship for optimal data sharing.

ISAcreator is a user-friendly editor that researchers can use to collect and curate experimental metadata, describing the experimental steps using community-defined minimum reporting requirements and ontologies where possible.

ISAcreator supports, among other things:

• Collecting and curating the experimental metadata in a spreadsheet-like form. Basic spreadsheet functionality has been augmented with features such as support for ontology annotation, an experimental design wizard, and, among other things, facilities to import existing tabular data.
• Validating the metadata against configuration files (templates), which specify the fields and ontology terms (and can be created with the ISAconfigurator tool).
• Editing/converting files to major submission formats for a variety of international public repositories (ENA/SRA, Metabolights, Pride, ArrayExpress)

ISA-TAB formatted datasets are then amenable to be used by the rest of the ISA software suite to:

• Store and browse, privately or publicly.
• Analyze with existing tools.
• Publish data for your article.
• Release, publish linked data, reason, and nanopublish.

Help Links

ISAcreator information on the ISATools blog

ISAcommons user community page

ISAtools Website

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