Skip to main content
The SPARC Data Structure 2.0
Tom Gillespie, Anita Bandrowski, Jeffrey S. Grethe, Anna Pilko, Gabi Pine, Bhavesh Patel, Monique Surles-Zeigler, Maryann E. Martone
Presenting author:
Tom Gillespie
The NIH Common Fund's Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions (SPARC) initiative is a large-scale program that seeks to accelerate the development of therapeutic devices that modulate electrical activity in nerves to improve organ function. Integral to the SPARC program are the rich anatomical and functional datasets produced by investigators across the SPARC consortium that provide key details about organ-specific circuitry, including structural and functional connectivity, mapping of cell types and molecular profiling. To ensure SPARC datasets are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR), they are all submitted following a standard scheme established by the SPARC Knowledge Management and Curation Team, with inspiration from BIDS, called the SPARC Data Structure (SDS). The first version of the SDS has been in use for two years and is representing data from a variety of modalities such as microscopy, physiology, electrophysiology, transcriptomics. Over that time we have collected additional use cases and issues with the current version of SDS. Here we report on the development of SDS 2.0 that incorporates what we have learned from our experiences. The major updates are focused on identifying subjects and samples and separating their metadata, regularizing folder naming conventions so that folder structure can be validated statically, support for dataset types beyond experimental data, and more.