ISA extension

The ISA extension relates research organized through investigations, studies, and assays to the ARC Abstract Model. It provides specialized research concepts within the shared framework of administrative, provenance, and semantic context.

#Organization and context

ISA-based organization helps describe how individual research activities belong to a larger investigation. The extension connects these descriptions to the common model, so that specialized research organization remains associated with recognizable metadata structures.

For a measurements table and a derived analysis result, ISA-oriented descriptions can situate the research activities within the investigation. The administrative core addresses identity and responsibility, the provenance core relates inputs and outputs to processes, and the semantic core explains measured variables and units.

#Model, format, and workspace

The ISA extension is a conceptual part of the abstract model. ISA-XLSX specifies a tabular expression of ISA-based descriptions, with extensions for computational workflows, their runs, and file fragments.

The ARC ISA XLSX Workspace Profile provides conventions for using that metadata together with research resources in a working environment. These layers address related questions: what the information represents, how it is encoded, and how collaborators work with it.

#Connecting related descriptions

Workflow Run addresses computational workflow execution; Datamap addresses annotation of data fragments. Together with ISA organization, these extensions support descriptions that span experimental and computational research.

When preparing ARC RO-Crate, the relationship to the abstract model provides a basis for expressing the recorded context in the publication representation. The information available still depends on what was documented in the workspace.