MEDFORD in a Box: Improvements and Future Directions for a Metadata Description Language
Polina Shpilker, Benjamin Stubbs, Michael Sayers, Yumin Lee, Lenore Cowen, Donna Slonim, Shaun Wallace, Alva Couch, Noah M. Daniels

TL;DR
This paper introduces MEDFORD-in-a-Box (MIAB), an enhanced ecosystem for the MEDFORD metadata language, aimed at improving usability, validation, and data transport to promote better research reproducibility.
Contribution
The paper presents MIAB, a comprehensive update to MEDFORD with improved validation, export capabilities, and a visual IDE to facilitate metadata creation for researchers.
Findings
Enhanced validation routines in MEDFORD parser
BagIt export capability added for data transport
Improved VS Code extension with visual IDE
Abstract
Scientific research metadata is vital to ensure the validity, reusability, and cost-effectiveness of research efforts. The MEDFORD metadata language was previously introduced to simplify the process of writing and maintaining metadata for non-programmers. However, barriers to entry and usability remain, including limited automatic validation, difficulty of data transport, and user unfamiliarity with text file editing. To address these issues, we introduce MEDFORD-in-a-Box (MIAB), a documentation ecosystem to facilitate researcher adoption and earlier metadata capture. MIAB contains many improvements, including an updated MEDFORD parser with expanded validation routines and BagIt export capability. MIAB also includes an improved VS Code extension that supports these changes through a visual IDE. By simplifying metadata generation, this new tool supports the creation of correct,…
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Taxonomy
TopicsScientific Computing and Data Management · Research Data Management Practices · Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies
