Supporting data for "biotoolsSchema : a formalised schema for bioinformatics software description"

Life scientists routinely face massive and heterogeneous data analysis tasks, and must find and access the most suitable databases or software in a jungle of web-accessible resources. The diversity of information used to describe life-scientific digital resources presents an obstacle to their utilisation. Although several standardisation efforts are emerging, no information schema has been sufficiently detailed to enable uniform semantic and syntactic description - and cataloguing - of bioinformatics resources. Here we describe biotoolsSchema, a formalised information model which balances the needs of conciseness for rapid adoption, while still providing rich technical information and scientific context. biotoolsSchema results from a series of community-driven workshops, and is deployed in the bio.tools registry, providing the scientific community with more than 17,000 machine-readable and human-understandable descriptions of software and other digital life-science resources. We compare our approach to related initiatives and provide alignments to foster interoperability and reusability. biotoolsSchema supports the formalised, rigorous and consistent specification of the syntax and semantics of bioinformatics resources, and enables cataloguing efforts such as bio.tools that help scientists to find, comprehend and compare resources. The use of biotoolsSchema in bio.tools promotes the FAIRness of research software; a key element of open and reproducible developments for data-intensive sciences.