Tool Information Standards
Information standards for bioinformatics tools
A stack of community-defined, open and integrated technologies, technical standards and guidelines:
- Comprehensive list of scientific, technical and administrative software attributes to support cataloguing, discovery, use and interoperability of software
- A practical description model for bioinformatics software - biotoolsSchema - which reduces the complexity of bioinformatics software into collections of readily understandable functional units.
- Precise tool function descriptions in terms of their operations, types of input and output data, data formats and common topics, using the EDAM ontology
- Controlled vocabularies for consistent descriptions of technical software aspects such as programming language and license.
- Define flexible information requirements - which software attributes that can, should or must be specified for different types of tools within a set of tool descriptions - using tool information profiles.
- Broadly applicable to diverse types of tool including application software, workflows and APIs.
- User-friendly guidelines on how attribute should be specified when describing software.
- Built by an open community.
