Technical details

Version 11.1 by lzehl on 2021/03/08 19:37

openMINDS is designed as modular as possible, in order to facilitate extensions and maintenance of existing, as well as development and integration of new metadata models and schemas. The layout and technical requirements for this modularity are described below.

In parallel, openMINDS tries to consider the various programming skills present in the neuroscience research community. For this reason, openMINDS established an integration pipeline which gradually increases the level of technical detail: starting from a user-friendly, lightweight schema template and ending with established, highly technical metadata schema formats (e.g., JSON-Schema).

Please find below a documentation of the layout and requirements needed to keep the openMINDS modularity, the syntax of the openMINDS schema template, as well as the openMINDS integration pipeline.

Overview of the openMINDS layout

In summary, openMINDS is the overall umbrella for a set of distributed GitHub repositories, each defining a particular metadata model for neuroscience research products.

The openMINDS schema template syntax

All openMINDS metadata models use a light-weighted schema template syntax for defining the metadata. The correspondingly formatted schema files use the extension: .schema.tpl.json.

Although, as the file extension suggests, this openMINDS schema template syntax is inspired by JSON-Schema, it facilitates or even excludes technical aspects that are generally expected for the openMINDS schemas making it more human-readable, especially for untrained eyes. Behind the scenes, within the openMINDS integration pipeline (cf. below), this schema template syntax is then interpreted and flexibly translated to various formal metadata formats (e.g., JSON-Schema). Please find in the following a full documentation of the openMINDS schema template syntax and how it needs to be interpreted.

The openMINDS "_type"

The openMINDS integration pipeline

(coming soon)