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FAIR Data Station for Lightweight Metadata Management & Validation of Omics Studies

Background The Life sciences is an interdisciplinary field of research and one of the the biggest suppliers of scientific data. Reusing and connecting this data can uncover hidden insights and lead to new concepts, provided there is machine-actionable metadata available about the scientific experiments conducted with a degree of completeness that reflect the FAIR guiding principles. While stakeholders have embraced the FAIR principles, in practice there are a limited number of easy to adopt practical implementations available that fulfil the needs of data producers. Findings We developed the FAIR Data Station, a lightweight application written in Java, that aims to support researchers in managing research metadata according to the FAIR principles. It uses the ISA metadata framework and metadata standards to capture experimental metadata. The FAIR Data Station metadata registration workflow consists of three main modules. Based on the minimal information checklist(s) selected by the user, a web-based “form generation module” creates a standardized metadata template Excel workbook which is used as a familiar environment for offline sample metadata registration. A web-based “validation module” checks the format of the metadata recorded in the workbook. The “resource module” subsequently exports the validated set of recorded metadata into an RDF data file, enabling (cross-project) meta data searches. Conclusions Turning FAIR into reality requires the availability of easy to adopt data FAIRification workflows that provide immediate beneficial incentives to the individual researcher. As such the FAIR Data Station provides in addition to the means to correctly FAIRify sequence data, the means to build searchable databases of (local) projects and can assists in ENA metadata submission of sequence data. The FAIR Data Station is available at http://fairbydesign.nl.