Technical details

Version 16.1 by lzehl on 2021/03/08 20:14

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.

Target & context templates

All openMINDS schemas have to have a "_type" to be recognized as target templates. In other words, the "_type" is used to define the openMINDS namespace of a corresponding schema using the following naming convention:

"_type": "https://openminds.ebrains.eu/<<schema-model>>/<<schema-name>>",

where <<schema-model>> has to be replaced with the label of the openMINDS metadata model the corresponding schema belongs to and <<schema-name>> exchanged with the label of that schema.

If an openMINDS schema template file DOES NOT define a "_type", it is interpreted as a context template which requires an extension to become a target template.

Context templates are and should be used when multiple openMINDS schemas (target templates) have the same subset of properties. This common subset of properties can then be defined within a single context schema instead of each target template which facilitates the long-term maintenance of these properties.

String properties

(coming soon)

Numerical properties

(coming soon)

Object properties

(coming soon)

Property arrays

(coming soon)

The openMINDS integration pipeline

(coming soon)