Pre-workshop post on the FuGE / ISA-TAB Workshop, 8-9 December

Tomorrow is the first day of a two-day workshop set up to continue the integration process between the ISA-TAB format and the FuGE standard. (Well, technically, it starts tonight with a workshop dinner, where I'll get to catch up with the people in the workshop, many of whom I haven't seen since the MGED 11 meeting in Italy this past summer. Should be fun!)

ISA-TAB can be seen as the next generation of MAGE-TAB, a very popular format with biologists who need to get their data and metadata into a common format acceptable by public repositories such as ArrayExpress. ISA-TAB goes one step further, and does for tabular formats what FuGE does for object models and XML formats: that is, it is able to represent multi-omics experiments rather than just the transcriptomics experiments of MAGE-TAB. I encourage you to find out more about both FuGE and ISA-TAB by looking at their respective project pages. The FuGE group also has a very nice introduction to the model in their Nature Biotechnology article.

Each day I'll provide a summary of what's gone on at the workshop, which centers around the current status of both ISA-TAB and some relevant FuGE extensions, as well as the production of a seamless conversion from FuGE-ML to ISA-TAB and back again. ISA-TAB necessarily cannot handle as much detail as the FuGE model can (being limited by the tabular format), and therefore in the FuGE-ML to ISA-TAB direction, it is possible that it may not be entirely lossless. However, this workshop and all the work that's gone on around it aims to reconcile the two formats as much as possible. And, even though I have mentioned a caveat or two, this reconciliation is entirely possible: both ISA-TAB and FuGE share the same high-level structures. Indeed, ISA-TAB was created with FuGE in mind, to ensure that such a useful undertaking used all it could of the FuGE Object Model. It is important to remember that FuGE is an abstract model which can be converted into many formats, including XML. Because it is an abstract model, many projects can make use of its structures while maintaing whatever concrete format they wish.

Specific topics of the workshop include:

• Advance and possibly finalize XSLT rendering of FUGE Documents into ISA-TAB. This includes the finishing-off of the generic FuGE XSL stylesheet.
• Work on some of the extensions, including FCM, Gel-ML, and MAGE2. MAGE2 is the most interesting for me for this workshop, as I've heard that it's almost complete. This is the XML format that is a direct extension of the FuGE model, and will be very useful for bioinformaticians wishing to store, share and search their transcriptomics data using a multi-omics standard like FuGE.
  

Thanks to Philippe Rocca-Serra and Susanna-Assunta Sansone for the hard work they've done on the format specification, and for everyone who's coming today. It's a deliberately small group so that we can spend our time in technical discussion rather than in presentations. I'm a bit of a nut about data and metadata standards (and am in complete agreement with Frank over at peanutbutter on the triumverate of experimental standards) and so I love these types of meetings. It's going to be fun, and I'll keep you updated!