BioSimulators: a central registry of simulation engines and services for recommending specific tools

Computational models have great potential to accelerate bioscience, bioengineering, and medicine. However, it remains challenging to reproduce and reuse simulations, in part, because the numerous formats and methods for simulating various subsystems and scales remain siloed by different software tools. For example, each tool must be executed through a distinct interface. To help investigators find and use simulation tools, we developed BioSimulators (https://biosimulators.org), a central registry of the capabilities of simulation tools and consistent Python, command-line and containerized interfaces to each version of each tool. The foundation of BioSimulators is standards, such as CellML, SBML, SED-ML and the COMBINE archive format, and validation tools for simulation projects and simulation tools that ensure these standards are used consistently. To help modelers find tools for particular projects, we have also used the registry to develop recommendation services. We anticipate that BioSimulators will help modelers exchange, reproduce, and combine simulations

EDAM Browser: visualization of EDAM and annotated bioinformatics resources

International audienceEDAM is an ontology widely used to describe bioinformatics resources (tools, databases, workflows, training, etc.). However, the exploration of the ontology itself by users who might not be ontology experts remains sub-optimal, with most of the usual interfaces being either too complex, too slow, or too generic.Here we present EDAM Browser, which lets users explore EDAM with an interface tailored to its structure and properties. The features of this ontology browser are focused on the needs of EDAM's end-users, who search and explore the ontology to find or annotate bioinformatics resources.A unique feature of EDAM Browser is the visualization of all ""positions"" of a selected concept in the full ontology ""tree"" (DAG), with all paths to the root highlighted. One of EDAM Browser's main added values is the aggregated search across various registries (e.g. bio.tools, TeSS, BioSphere), and its speed.The lightweight architecture makes it easy to download and run EDAM Browser on any server or personal computer, either as a local HTML file or on a web server. EDAM Browser has also been used for other ontologies, and making the reuse smoother and more usable is part of the ongoing work. Contributions are welcome

EDAM: the bioscientific data analysis ontology (update 2021) [version 1; not peer reviewed]

EDAM [1] is a domain ontology of data analysis and data management in bio- and other sciences, and science-based applications. It comprises concepts related to analysis, modelling, optimisation, and data life-cycle. Targetting usability by diverse end users, the structure of EDAM is relatively simple, divided into 4 main sections: Topic Operation Data (incl. Identifier) Format EDAM is used in numerous resources, for example Bio.tools, Galaxy, Debian, or the ELIXIR Europe training portal TeSS. Thanks to the annotations with EDAM, computational tools, workflows, standards, data, and learning materials are easier to find, compare, choose, and integrate. EDAM contributes to open science by allowing semantic annotation of processed data, thus making the data more understandable, findable, and comparable. EDAM and its applications lower the barrier and effort for scientists and citizens alike, towards doing scientific research in a more open, reliable, and inclusive way. The main improvements in 2021 include: The addition of essential concepts of data management and open science Improved automated validation (CI) Improved contribution processes towards more inclusion and engagement with communities of scientific experts, software engineers, and volunteers Easier to contribute, and therefore new contributors and new collaborations. And welcoming more! News from the applications: Galaxy can now visualise the tools panel sorted by EDAM. The EDAM community brings together software engineers and science experts (academic, industrial, citizen), professionals and volunteers. It can be followed and contributed to via various channels. One option is GitHub, with dedicated repositories incl. edamontology and others. Other platforms for contributions to EDAM are especially the generic ontology browsers of the NCBO BioPortal (EDAM, EDAM Bioimaging [2]) and WebProtégé (EDAM, EDAM Bioimaging; free registration required also for viewing). The main communication channel is Gitter. Along with the ontology, the community has developed a number of tools that enhance user experience with EDAM: EDAM Browser [3] is a lightweight and fast web-based ontology browser that provides a number of user-oriented features such as aggregated search across various EDAM-annotated resources (e.g. Bio.tools, TeSS), and suggesting changes to EDAM. EDAMmap is a tool for text mining EDAM concepts from articles. EDAM Popovers is a web-browser add-on/extension for showing details of EDAM concepts found in a website. Great e.g. for code and textual data on GitHub References: [1] Ison, J., Kalaš, M., Jonassen, I., et al. (2013). EDAM: an ontology of bioinformatics operations, types of data and identifiers, topics and formats. Bioinformatics, 29(10): 1325-1332. DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btt113 [2] Matúš Kalaš, Laure Plantard, Joakim Lindblad, Martin Jones, Nataša Sladoje, Moritz A. Kirschmann, Anatole Chessel, Leandro Scholz, Fabienne Rössler, Laura Nicolás Sáenz, Estibaliz Gómez de Mariscal, John Bogovic, Alexandre Dufour, Xavier Heiligenstein, Dominic Waithe, Marie-Charlotte Domart, Matthia Karreman, Raf Van de Plas, Robert Haase, David Hörl, Lassi Paavolainen, Ivana Vrhovac Madunić, Dean Karaica, Arrate Muñoz-Barrutia, Paula Sampaio, Daniel Sage, Sebastian Munck, Ofra Golani, Josh Moore, Florian Levet, Jon Ison, Alban Gaignard, Hervé Ménager, Chong Zhang, Kota Miura, Julien Colombelli, Perrine Paul-Gilloteaux, and welcoming new contributors! (2020). EDAM-bioimaging: the ontology of bioimage informatics operations, topics, data, and formats (update 2020) [version 1; not peer reviewed]. F1000Research, 9(ELIXIR):162 (Poster) DOI: 10.7490/f1000research.1117826.1 [3] Brancotte, B., Blanchet, C. and Ménager, H. (2018). A reusable tree-based web-visualization to browse EDAM ontology, and contribute to it. J. Open Source Softw., 3(27): 698. DOI: 10.21105/joss.00698publishedVersio

BioSimulators: a central registry of simulation engines and services for recommending specific tools.

Computational models have great potential to accelerate bioscience, bioengineering, and medicine. However, it remains challenging to reproduce and reuse simulations, in part, because the numerous formats and methods for simulating various subsystems and scales remain siloed by different software tools. For example, each tool must be executed through a distinct interface. To help investigators find and use simulation tools, we developed BioSimulators (https://biosimulators.org), a central registry of the capabilities of simulation tools and consistent Python, command-line and containerized interfaces to each version of each tool. The foundation of BioSimulators is standards, such as CellML, SBML, SED-ML and the COMBINE archive format, and validation tools for simulation projects and simulation tools that ensure these standards are used consistently. To help modelers find tools for particular projects, we have also used the registry to develop recommendation services. We anticipate that BioSimulators will help modelers exchange, reproduce, and combine simulations

BioSimulators: a central registry of simulation engines and services for recommending specific tools

Computational models have great potential to accelerate bioscience, bioengineering, and medicine. However, it remains challenging to reproduce and reuse simulations, in part, because the numerous formats and methods for simulating various subsystems and scales remain siloed by different software tools. For example, each tool must be executed through a distinct interface. To help investigators find and use simulation tools, we developed BioSimulators (https://biosimulators.org), a central registry of the capabilities of simulation tools and consistent Python, command-line and containerized interfaces to each version of each tool. The foundation of BioSimulators is standards, such as CellML, SBML, SED-ML and the COMBINE archive format, and validation tools for simulation projects and simulation tools that ensure these standards are used consistently. To help modelers find tools for particular projects, we have also used the registry to develop recommendation services. We anticipate that BioSimulators will help modelers exchange, reproduce, and combine simulations

BioSimulators: a central registry of simulation engines and services for recommending specific tools

International audienceComputational models have great potential to accelerate bioscience, bioengineering, and medicine. However, it remains challenging to reproduce and reuse simulations, in part, because the numerous formats and methods for simulating various subsystems and scales remain siloed by different software tools. For example, each tool must be executed through a distinct interface. To help investigators find and use simulation tools, we developed BioSimulators (https://biosimulators.org), a central registry of the capabilities of simulation tools and consistent Python, command-line and containerized interfaces to each version of each tool. The foundation of BioSimulators is standards, such as CellML, SBML, SED-ML and the COMBINE archive format, and validation tools for simulation projects and simulation tools that ensure these standards are used consistently. To help modelers find tools for particular projects, we have also used the registry to develop recommendation services. We anticipate that BioSimulators will help modelers exchange, reproduce, and combine simulations