A user friendly approach for metadata collection and organisation for animal electrophysiology experiments
Presenting author:
The need for standardisation of data and metadata is quickly growing in neuroscience. Diverse standards have emerged to comply with this need, among them the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS). Under the umbrella of BIDS, data and metadata from diverse modalities have now been homogenized, and a recent extension proposal aims at covering animal electrophysiology: BEP032 (see also abstract "BIDS-animal-ephys").
However the development of such standards is only of use when the primary metadata can also be comprehensively collected during the experiment. Experimentalists frequently lack the expertise and time to familiarise with the details of such standards and the implementation in the experimental environment. A key component to successful generation of FAIR data is the simple and user-friendly collection of the primary metadata.
We here introduce a metadata collection and organisation framework that builds on top of existing tools and proposals, mostly RedCap (https://projectredcap.org) for simple, survey-based daily collection of metadata and the recently proposed BIDS extension for animal electrophysiology, BEP032 available at http://bit.ly/BIDS-animal-ephys. We present how version control can be included in RedCap projects and demonstrate the integration with the current version of the BEP032 to comprehensively capture metadata and generate standardised and FAIR datasets.
However the development of such standards is only of use when the primary metadata can also be comprehensively collected during the experiment. Experimentalists frequently lack the expertise and time to familiarise with the details of such standards and the implementation in the experimental environment. A key component to successful generation of FAIR data is the simple and user-friendly collection of the primary metadata.
We here introduce a metadata collection and organisation framework that builds on top of existing tools and proposals, mostly RedCap (https://projectredcap.org) for simple, survey-based daily collection of metadata and the recently proposed BIDS extension for animal electrophysiology, BEP032 available at http://bit.ly/BIDS-animal-ephys. We present how version control can be included in RedCap projects and demonstrate the integration with the current version of the BEP032 to comprehensively capture metadata and generate standardised and FAIR datasets.