linkml-arrays is a markup and schema format for specifying arrays that is compatible with many backends and formats.
Goals:
authorable: Can be written by hand, but also compatible with authoring tools that can autogenerate a schema descriptor from a concrete array.
portable: in YAML, usable from many different tools.
decoupled from serialization: Makes no assumptions about how the array is represented on disk or in memory.
metadata-enriched: linked data annotations for arrays to eg. tag with specific units, types, and semantics
nonprescriptive/generic: descriptions are arbitrary, don't say how arrays should be represented, but allows downstream schema/formats/etc. like NWB et al. to make those prescriptions - a unification layer that allows those negotiations to happen.
..?
Not goals:
API: not a representation of how arrays should be used/capabilities they should have in programming environments. Arrays just need to be able to have a type and a shape.
From: https://github.com/rly/linkml-arrays-paper/issues/2
Along with https://github.com/orgs/linkml/discussions/2020#discussioncomment-9161935 , we want to differentiate what we're doing here from the above approaches.
linkml-arrays is a markup and schema format for specifying arrays that is compatible with many backends and formats.
Goals:
Not goals: