ISA

Investigation/Study/Assay (ISA) infrastructure is the first general-purpose format and freely available desktop software suite targeted to experimentalists, curators and developers and that:

– assists in the reporting and local management of experimental metadata (i.e. sample characteristics, technology and measurement types, sample-to-data relationships) from studies employing one or a combination of technologies;
– empowers users to uptake community-defined minimum information checklists and ontologies, where required;
– formats studies for submission to a growing number of international public repositories endorsing the tools, currently ENA (genomics), PRIDE (proteomics) and ArrayExpress (transcriptomics).

Ferguson, Jen (2012) `Description and Annotation of Biomedical Data Sets,` Journal of eScience Librarianship: Vol. 1: Iss. 1, Article 9.
Available at: http://escholarship.umassmed.edu/jeslib/vol1/iss1/9