The metabolomics workbench file status website: a metadata repository promoting FAIR principles of metabolomics data

Christian D. Powell, Hunter N.B. Moseley

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Background: An updated version of the mwtab Python package for programmatic access to the Metabolomics Workbench (MetabolomicsWB) data repository was released at the beginning of 2021. Along with updating the package to match the changes to MetabolomicsWB’s ‘mwTab’ file format specification and enhancing the package’s functionality, the included validation facilities were used to detect and catalog file inconsistencies and errors across all publicly available datasets in MetabolomicsWB. Results: The MetabolomicsWB File Status website was developed to provide continuous validation of MetabolomicsWB data files and a useful interface to all found inconsistencies and errors. This list of detectable issues/errors include format parsing errors, format compliance issues, access problems via MetabolomicsWB’s REST interface, and other small inconsistencies that can hinder reusability. The website uses the mwtab Python package to pull down and validate each available analysis file and then generates an html report. The website is updated on a weekly basis. Moreover, the Python website design utilizes GitHub and GitHub.io, providing an easy to replicate template for implementing other metadata, virtual, and meta- repositories. Conclusions: The MetabolomicsWB File Status website provides a metadata repository of validation metadata to promote the FAIR use of existing metabolomics datasets from the MetabolomicsWB data repository.

Original languageEnglish
Article number299
JournalBMC Bioinformatics
Volume24
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2023

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s).

Keywords

  • FAIR
  • Metabolomics Workbench
  • Metadata repository
  • Validation
  • Website
  • mwtab

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Structural Biology
  • Biochemistry
  • Molecular Biology
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Applied Mathematics

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