User-friendly ISA-based metadata annotation of life science experiments with ISA Wizard

Project Leads:
- Sebastian Beier, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Institute of Bio- and Geosciences, Bioinformatics (IBG-4), 52425 Jülich - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
- Patrick König, Leibniz Institut für Pflanzengenetik und Kulturpflanzenforschung (IPK) Gatersleben, 06466 Seeland - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Abstract:
To guarantee that the results data of life science experiments align with the FAIR guidelines, proper metadata annotation of the experimental outcomes is crucial. The widely accepted metadata annotation format for this field is the ISA framework. However, achieving FAIR-compliant annotation of life science experiments is currently hindered by several challenges. The manual generation of ISA-compliant metadata is labor-intensive and prone to errors due to the complexity of ISA itself and the heterogeneous nature of the datasets derived from experiments. Additionally, researchers conducting life science related experiments often lack expertise in utilizing metadata schemas and related ontology concepts. Existing software libraries for the programmatic generation of ISA-compliant metadata are not easily usable by most researchers withoutsignificant programming skills and a deep understanding of ISA and its serialization formats ISA-Tab and ISA-JSON. Existing software with graphical user interfaces for these application areas are difficult to use without domain-specific expert knowledge.

To address these issues, we will develop an intuitive and user-friendly tool called “ISA-Wizard” as a web application that assists users in creating ISA-compliant metadata for the resulting datasets of their experiments. The ISA wizard provides a step-by-step questionnaire-based process for data entry with content recommendations and ontology term suggestions. Through comprehensive JSON-based configuration features it will ensure adherence to ISA-compliance and domain-specific minimal information checklists. Users are able to export and save the generated metadata files as ISA-JSON. We will also offer the capability to generate and publish FAIR Digital Objects (FDOs) by leveraging the ARC-concept of the NFDI consortium DataPLANT and their PLANTdataHUB infrastructure by using their software libraries and REST APIs.

During the de.NBI BioHackathon we want to find collaborators from various life science domains to create domain-specific and experiment-specific configuration files for ISA Wizard instances that can serve as configuration receipts and proof of concept of the generic capabilities of the wizard. By developing a user-friendly web application with interoperability features, we aim to promote the adoption of FAIR principles and enhance data accessibility and reusability in the life science communities within de.NBI, ELIXIR, NFDIs and beyond