CEDAR Overview BD2K 2016.pdf

Online biomedical repositories contain a wealth of freely available data submitted by the research community, but to reuse this data in further studies requires well-annotated associated metadata. There is a growing set of community-developed standards for creating this metadata, often in the form of templates; still, the difficulties of working with these standards are significant. The Center for Expanded Data Annotation and Retrieval (CEDAR) is building an end-to-end system to ease the authoring of metadata and the templates. This system targets the creation of higher quality metadata to facilitate data discovery, interoperability, and reuse. With our public release in September 2016, we now support many new features which make authoring easier.Template and Metadata Repository: We developed a standardized representation of metadata and the templates that describe them, together with Web-based services to store, search, and share these resources. Templates created using CEDAR technology are stored in our openly accessible community repository, and can now be shared with other people and groups. Researchers can search for templates to annotate their studies, and share their metadata with others. We’ve now added Web-based interfaces and REST APIs to facilitate access to templates, and all the metadata collected using those templates.Template and Metadata Editor: We developed highly interactive Web-based tools to simplify the process of authoring metadata and templates. The Template Editor allows users to create, search, and author templates. An upgraded feature provides interoperation with ontologies: interactive look-up services linked to NCBO’s BioPortal (bioportal.bioontology.org) let template authors find ontology terms to annotate fields in their templates and to define possible values of fields, including creating new terms and value sets. The Metadata Editor, which creates a forms-based acquisition interface from a template, has been redesigned so users can more easily populate metadata based on the template fields.