The CEDAR Workbench: An Ontology-Assisted Environment for Authoring Metadata that Describe Scientific Experiments

TL;DR

The CEDAR Workbench is a web-based, ontology-assisted environment designed to facilitate the creation, management, and sharing of high-quality metadata for scientific experiments, enhancing data integration and reuse.

Contribution

It introduces a versatile, REST-based platform that enables ontology-enriched metadata authoring, validation, and sharing, improving upon existing tools for scientific data annotation.

Findings

Supports multiple data formats (JSON, JSON-LD, RDF) for interoperability.

Provides APIs for validation and submission to external repositories.

Open-source and freely available for the scientific community.

Abstract

The Center for Expanded Data Annotation and Retrieval (CEDAR) aims to revolutionize the way that metadata describing scientific experiments are authored. The software we have developed--the CEDAR Workbench--is a suite of Web-based tools and REST APIs that allows users to construct metadata templates, to fill in templates to generate high-quality metadata, and to share and manage these resources. The CEDAR Workbench provides a versatile, REST-based environment for authoring metadata that are enriched with terms from ontologies. The metadata are available as JSON, JSON-LD, or RDF for easy integration in scientific applications and reusability on the Web. Users can leverage our APIs for validating and submitting metadata to external repositories. The CEDAR Workbench is freely available and open-source.