EBIBioSamples / biosamples-v4

The source code for the new version of the EMBL-EBI BioSamples database
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/biosamples/
Apache License 2.0
11 stars 9 forks source link

Separate specification from implementation? #719

Open multimeric opened 1 month ago

multimeric commented 1 month ago

I understand that there is a metadata specification underlying the biosamples database. From what I can determine, this schema is part of it, but there are other domain-specific schemas such as MINSEQE in the data model as well. From reading papers such as https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkab1046, I kind of got the impression that the schema was already available somewhere, but I'm not sure this is the case.

I wonder if there would be merit in decoupling the schema from the Java implementation: basically writing a series of pure JSON (LD-JSON?) schemas. This way the good work that has lead to this standardisation can be easily found and used in other databases.