daveneti
commented
5 months ago The concepts of Program, Trial and Study are very specific to the source data / business processses. We have also have use cases where a study has no trial and a study has a different program to its trial program.
I agree the defintiions need updating, but it might be difficult to come to a concenus.
Current available definitions :
Program : A BrAPI Program represents the high level organization or group who is responsible for conducting trials and studies. Things like Breeding Programs and Funded Projects are considered BrAPI Programs. A Program can contain multiple Trials. A Trial can contain multiple Studies. Trial : Trials comprise of multiple studies. A "trial" in BrAPI represents an "investigation" in MIAPPE (Minimal Information about a Plant Phenotyping Experiment). MIAPPE definition : Investigations are research programmes with defined aims. They can exist at various scales (for example, they could encompass a grant-funded programme of work, the various components comprising a peer-reviewed publication, or a single experiment).
Issues :
Overlap : There seems to be significant overlap between these two notions. It is difficult to know what is a Trial and what is a Program for communities that don't usually use these terms. Some things can be both. There is also some overlap of Trial with a general notion of dataset that isn't really defined and doesn't appear in "MIAPPE:Investigation". Cardinality : The link Program -> Trials is one to many when there are examples of many to many in reality. A Trial can be funded partly through multiple programs for example. Ambiguity : There is ambiguity on wether a Trial is linked to one or more publications and if the data in it is fixed or can evolve over time.